


stars in our eyes, face to the skies

by orphan_account



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, Multi, No Smut, Other, Pararibulitis (Dirk Gently), alien!farah, bb!rapunzel, droid!estevez, droid!zimmerfield, force user!bart, force user!dirk, force user!rowdy three, nonbinary!bart, similar events to season one but not The Same, teen for mild swearing and descriptions of violence, theres rly not that much romance so don't come looking for that, this WAS for the big bang but now Look Where We Are
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-01-25 06:22:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 28
Words: 47,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12525008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Farah sighed. “This sounds… this sounds pretty implausible, but it also sounds like exactly the sort of thing Patrick believed in.”Both of them gawked at her. Even Dirk seemed surprised that anyone believed in his flighty life philosophy.“What? What do you mean?”“Patrick was obsessed with the force. He said he was part of an organization that took special interest in people who exhibited force-like abilities, so they could be studied. Force abilities hadn’t been displayed in anyone born in the past hundred years outside of the organization, and that fascinated him. Even after he left and became part of the resistance, the concept of the force enthralled him.”Todd was about to reply to what Farah had said when he saw the expression on Dirk’s face– he was pale, much paler than usual, and he looked drawn into himself like he’d just remembered something important and terrifying. The expression scared him.a Star Wars AU will a little less force and a little more mystery than originally intended.





	1. Jumpstart

LOCATION: the planet Tiber. As far as you can get from civilization without leaving it entirely. Pretty much just a big ball of dirt and old ship parts.

 

Amanda lay in her bed, breathing meditatively as countless self-help books had instructed her to do (whether or not this was helping was moot; it was the most she was capable of doing as her body was wracked with pain and fear, every breath so beleaguered that she worried it might be her last). 

It was dark in her room, but darkness had never scared her. No, what scared her were the pale, eyeless human forms shifting above her, suffocating her. 

Or at least that’s what her eyes were telling her she was seeing. She'd had enough experience to know that human sensory organs could be depressingly deficient at times; but in the end, whether or not the ghostlike forms were actually there was, once again, a moot point. 

Amanda told herself again and again that she was sure that the forms weren’t really there--not quite as sure as she'd like to have been, though, considering that her brain was doing everything in its power to convince her otherwise.

She'd had been hearing crashes and screams from outside for at least half an hour, although she barely had the presence of mind to pay attention to them. She’d heard enough gang raids to know what they sounded like; and she _also_ knew that her body couldn’t have picked a worse time to have an attack, but that didn’t stop her body from having it.

Amanda lived on the very edge of town, so in the part of her mind that wasn’t wracked with pain and fear she hoped that she might recover in time to climb into the hollow place under the floorboards where she usually hid during the frequent raids—she didn’t dare move yet, however.

Sadly, she had this thought right before hearing the sound of someone breaking open the front door to her small hut. Amidst her fear she attempted to ready herself for death and whatever sensations that might bring. It was the most she was capable of doing at the moment. 

She heard the door to her bedroom get flung open, and a moment later a group of figures appeared in the corner of her vision. She couldn’t really tell whether or not they were real—their eyes glowed an electrifying shade of blue, and as far as Amanda knew, that’s not something normal eyes usually did. But maybe these eyes were special.

She felt one of them grip her arm, and suddenly the ghosts disappeared from her vision, taking her usual fear with them and replacing it with a new, more exciting fear. She didn’t have a chance to react, however, because the next thing she knew everything had cut to black.

~~~

LOCATION: the “bustling” and “glamorous” “metropolis” of Wyvern

 

Todd awoke, not for the first time, to the mournful groans of a nearby Wookie. He hadn’t quite become fluent in Wookie speak yet—despite living with and working for one for the past couple years, although part of it might’ve been by choice—but he could tell that Dorian’s moans translated approximately to; “When I find you, you piece of scum, I’m going to make it so you can’t defecate without help, if you don’t get me my goddamn money!” Except much, much less clean.

Todd was afraid, but not as much as he should’ve been. Dorian was an extremely menacing Wookie—tall and gruff and terrifying when he really wanted to be—but he was also old, and getting a bit portly with his age. Plus, he was drunk at any point when he wasn’t high, and often he was both at the same time—and it takes _a lot_ of illegal substances to get a 300-pound Wookie intoxicated.

Todd could tell by the sound of Dorian’s voice, however, that he was not only much angrier than usual but also a lot closer. The ship that Todd and Dorian shared was considerably large, and Todd could easily avoid the towering Wookie for days on end.

It’s not that Todd didn’t _have_ the money that Dorian was asking for, it’s just that he didn’t _want_ to give it to him. Todd had much bigger problems that he needed to take care of first, and those problems would be much better than Dorian at finding him and killing him if he got overdue on his payments. Plus, Todd wanted to buy himself a new blaster soon in case those problems ever _did_ find their way to him.

Todd got upright in bed and shouldered his backpack and  mandoviol , deciding that getting as far from his bedroom as he could at the moment would be a good idea.

Before leaving his room, however, Todd leaned down over the slightly defective intercom he’d sloppily hooked up to his wall, muttering sarcastically; “Hey so Dorian, it’s Todd. I’m going out for a while. Don’t wait up.”

Todd’s low voice crackled over the hidden speakers in every room and hallway, and after a moment of delay he heard a livid growl from elsewhere in the winding halls of the ship. He couldn’t tell from the sound if Dorian was closer or farther away than he was before, but decided that booking it off the ship was probably his best option either way.

~~~

LOCATION: an unknown ship. Wyvern.

 

Dirk was afraid first thing when he woke up. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why he felt this way when he first opened his eyes, but he figured it was a mix between not knowing where he was and not being able to see past his own nose. Memories of waking up in cold dark rooms in the past itched at the back of his mind. He was far from surprised, though; fear had been pretty much his default setting lately.

One by one, Dirk’s memories came crawling back.

Where was he? It was definitely some kind of cargo ship. Other than that, he didn’t know. All he remembered was running into the first door he saw.

How did he get there? He was being chased. By who, well, he was never really sure. There was always someone chasing him, though; be it Empire mooks, religious zealots searching for any proof of whatever hokum they believed in, or mobsters looking to collect on debts he wouldn’t be able to pay for.

In the confusion Dirk had been searching for any way out, and he had found one in the open door to a colossal cargo ship parked in a streetside loading dock.

Where was he going to go? Dirk shivered as he realized that he would soon have to start figuring this out--planning wasn’t one of his strong suits.

Dirk came out of his reverie to find that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the room. He cheerfully took this to mean that things were soon going to begin looking up.

Dirk got up—his back stiff from sleeping on the floor—and began searching his surroundings.

He was in the bridge of a ship from the look of the consoles full of blinking lights that were gathered around him. He was puzzled for a moment, since he was pretty positive that the ship he got onto the night before had been much bigger. After a couple more minutes of investigation, however, Dirk found that he was in fact on a smaller exploration vessel within the larger cargo ship.

It took Dirk embarrassingly long to find the activation switch, but when he did he was relieved to hear the quiet sound of background machinery whirring to life. This relief only lasted a second, however, since the next thing he heard was the sound of someone entering a door down the hall.

Once more Dirk was forced to make a split second decision (yet again, not one of his strong suits) next thing he knew, he had dove into a gap between one of the metal consoles and the wall.

~~~

Todd could be slow sometimes, but he wasn’t stupid. He could tell that something was off from the moment he opened the door to the transpo to find that all of the lights have been turned on by someone other than himself. He was pretty sure that Dorian wasn’t sober enough at the moment even to _find_ the door to the transport ship—the clunker, Todd called it—let alone find the light switch.

Todd carefully and as silently as possible set down his bag and mandoviol and instead picked up a crowbar sitting conveniently beside the door. He began walking warily towards the bridge. He fought the urge to call out ‘hello?’ as if searching for a lost dog, knowing that if there was a stowaway on the ship it probably wouldn’t be a great idea to alert them to his presence.

The moment that Todd reached the main bridge console, he felt a chill down his spine. Someone was watching him.

~~~

Through a crack in the console he was behind Dirk peeked at the person who’d just walked into the bridge. It appeared to be a man, small and tense like a caged animal. He clearly knew that Dirk was there, so Dirk made yet another ill-conceived (a term that could easily be used to describe all of dirk’s life choices) split-second decision.

~~~

Todd’s creeping fear was replaced with panic when someone—his stowaway—jumped up from behind the console next to him.

“Hiiiiiiii.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave any comments/ideas/theories. Hopefully The next chapter will be up in a week, but I need some reinforcement to make that happen!


	2. Heartrate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ken receives a somewhat shocking wake up call

LOCATION: B-17. a planet so inconsequential and boring it almost doesn’t matter.

 

Ken’s face was cold, and there was something pressed up against it—a piece of metal.

He pulled his face away only to abruptly hit his head on yet another piece of metal behind him. He rubbed the back of his head and sighed.

Ken scrambled for information for a moment, his brain foggy from waking up.

He quickly remembered where he was: was inside of the confined maintenance space at the base of a giant transmitter, and he’d fallen asleep.

_There’s drool on the motherboard. I_ drooled _on the goddamn motherboard._ He thought drearily.

Ken attempted to shake himself awake, scolding himself for how unprofessional it was of him to fall asleep on the job. He did this since there wasn’t a supervisor there to do so for him; Ned was in the transpo and probably drunk out of his mind. He didn’t try to justify his impromptu nap with the fact that he’d been way overworked lately, and he definitely didn’t consider going right back to sleep on the cold, unforgiving surface of the motherboard.

Ken stretched his back and closed the hatch that guarded the labyrinth of wires. After wiping it of his own drool. he attempted to maneuver himself out of the cramped maintenance space without destroying anything on his way out.

Soon enough Ken was standing back on the barren wasteland that was planet B-17, one of the almost twenty planets of the Niner system that the empire used as throwaway transmitter stations. There used to be rumors that the entire system had been inhabited years before Ken’s time, but the Empire usually did a good job in stamping those kinds of things out. Besides, Ken didn’t like to pay attention to rumors when he was on a job, or in general.

Ken walked around the transmitter, inspecting his work. He was so focused on his handiwork, in fact, that he didn’t at first notice that giant clunker of a shipping vehicle that had parked itself next to his tiny transpo vehicle.

Ken observed as a tiny figure—dark and undefined from where he was standing—jumped out of the clunker and began wandering over to Ken’s transpo.

The first thing Ken thought of as he saw the figure beginning to enter his ship was not _oh no, Ned’s in there!_ It was instead; _dang, I liked that vehicle. Hope they don’t fuck it up or anything._

Incidentally, Ned came staggering out of the transpo just in time for the small figure to shoot him in the head with what was probably a blaster gun, from the look of the bright blue fire that went through one side of the man’s head and out the other.

Things seemed to be going in slow-mo in that moment, at least to Ken. At one point Ned was standing, the next he was on the ground with a hole in his head, and the next the figure that came from the cargo ship turned and began coming towards Ken.

Ken knew that he had to think fast, but he couldn’t for the life of him actually do it at the moment. He was rooted in place until the figure was only a few yards away and gaining, at which point Ken finally came to his senses and began running back towards the transmitter, unsure of what he was actually going to do when he got there.

Ken ran—or at least he jogged—behind the giant transmitter. He sat crouched there for a couple seconds, trying to see the figure from around the corner.

A ratty head of hair began to come into view, so Ken rounded the transmitter and ran around the other side, towards his transpo. He prepared himself for the experience of having to jump over his employer’s lifeless body.

The person—the murderer that was chasing him—was yelling something, but Ken didn’t bother to listen. He had bigger fish to fry, such as not dying.

Ken was mere yards away from his transpo—so close he felt as if his fingers were brushing against it—when Murphy’s Law decided to come into action

Ken tripped over something, and he felt his ankle twist painfully on the way down.

And suddenly, the pursuer was practically on top of him. They loomed over him, their shadow seeming to cover the entire planet despite their being considerably smaller than him.

“Are you Dirk Gently?” They asked, panting, their voice thick with an accent that Ken didn’t recognize.

“Wh-who?” Ken asked, his mind preoccupied with trying to figure out what part of his body to shield first. The person was staring at him with the big, wild eyes of a frazzled predator, like a cat just having realized it had become domesticated.

“So, you’re not Dirk Gently? You don’t even know him?”

Ken’s was shaking so hard he almost couldn’t get his words out. “No!”

“Damn.” Muttered the person before shoving the still-warm-from-murder blaster gun into the pocket of their formless canvas jumper. “Well  _ that’s  _ never happened before.”

They pulled something else out of their pocket and pointed it at Ken, who was at that moment extremely confused and very unready to die. A moment later, there was a pair of sleek purple cuffs encircling his wrists. He looked at them, bewildered, for a moment.

Ken’s imprisoner grinned at him. “D’ya like them? I got them offa storm trooper I killed a coupla weeks ago. Reckon they’re the nicest in the galaxy; ‘fore this I woulda just used a rusty chord I found sticking out of my ship, so really you should be thankin’ me.”

Ken was taking much longer than usual to comprehend what’s going on. He looked from the cuffs to his pursuer-turned-captor. So, all he could think to say, no matter how much he would end up embarrassed and regretful later, was; “Well, thanks”

Ken’s abductor laughed coarsely. “You’re welcome.”

Ken flinched away once again as the person reached towards him, this time to hoist him up by his wrists until he was standing and trying not to stumble on his twisted ankle.

“Wh-what do you want me to do?” he asked shakily as they began walking towards their own gigantic clunker of a ship.

They glanced back at him. “Well, I figure even if you’re not Dirk Gently I gotta hunch that you’ll be important anyway—and my hunches ain’t ever been wrong before—so I should take you with me. Plus, I don’t know what you’ll do otherwise; handcuffed on an abandoned planet with a dead body. You may as well come with me, I mean, what other option do you have?”

Ken was bitterly resentful of this statement; “Maybe I have people who care about me, who will come looking for me in a while!” He yelled after them, not quite sure  _ why  _ he was yelling.

Ken’s captor stopped dead in their tracks and turned all the way around to look at him. A manic smirk split across their face. “You don’t.”

Ken stood on the spot for a moment, feeling completely and utterly alone and not even bothering to deny the person’s statement. He considered his options:

 

  1.      Go with the murderous person, die



 

  1.      Stay on the barren wasteland that was B-17, die



 

  1.      Attempt to pilot his ship while wearing a pair of super-strength handcuffs, crash, and then die.



 

Out of all the options, the first seemed most likely to end in Ken actually coming out of this alive, be it a bit—or more than a bit—scathed. 

Finally, Ken struggled on his twisted ankle to limp after them. Upon hearing his staggered footsteps the person turned around again. When they saw him following them they didn’t act surprised, or even say anything. They simply smiled.

~~~

LOCATION: Wyvern again

For a criminal, Todd’s stowaway sure didn’t _look_ like a stowaway.

He was well dressed and well composed; wealthy-looking even. His hair was unruffled even after the struggle—almost like it was carved out of wood—and his shoes were clearly a very expensive pair, or at least an approximation of one.

He wore a beige double breasted jacket and pants. The only thing that seemed to be out of place was a stiff, bright yellow leather cape draped around his shoulders. Todd had never seen an accessory like it before.

Todd didn’t take an eye off him for even a second as he pulled the transpo out of the docking bay of the cargo ship and away from the trading city of Wyvern, watching his passenger for even the smallest sign or movement that might indicate the man would be waking up anytime soon. Suddenly he regretted not keeping handcuffs or at least some extra rope on the transpo.

Todd had been lucky that he’d picked up the crowbar, because the moment the stranger jumped out from behind one of the consoles he’d banged him right over the head without a second thought. Todd usually thought it best to shoot—or in this case, swing—first and ask questions later.

Except he hadn’t gotten a chance to ask those questions yet. His stowaway hadn’t woken up, and against his better judgement Todd was beginning to worry. An inch wide purple bruise had blossomed on the stranger’s temple.

Todd, unfortunately, had quite a bit of experience with head wounds, and he could tell that this one was going to be especially painful.

Todd had been so preoccupied with his stowaway, however, that he had made a vital mistake that he had yet to notice. He hit the button for the ship to start to warp so he could get out of the city of Wyvern and as far away as Dorian as possible. He only noticed his mistake once a red light from down the hall began to flash, accompanied by a startlingly large variety of alarm bells.

Todd jumped, for a moment totally unaware of what was going on. And then he remembered; once during a drunken stupor Dorian had attempted to fix the toilet in the transpo, but had only succeeded in somehow connecting the plumbing to the warp drive in a way that Todd had found to be totally irreversible (or at least, he was too lazy to figure out how to reverse it).

Long story short, if Todd wasn’t there to flush the thing every couple minutes after engaging then the drive would overload the toilet and the transpo would be transformed into a very unpleasant swimming pool.

Todd dashed down the hall and into the bathroom, already hearing the sound of water escaping the toilet bowl.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave any comments/ideas/theories. Hopefully The next chapter will be up in a week, but I need some reinforcement to make that happen!


	3. Foulness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A public figure is executed: Todd and Dirk reach an agreement that will soon go awry.

LOCATION: Extremely well-hidden resistance base on the otherwise busy city of Leviathan on the planet of, well, Leviathan.

 

When you’re a robot you don’t really  _ eat  _ anything, let alone have lunch, but lunch was still the most appropriate descriptor for what the two droids were having.

Est-vz and ZiM-12 were sitting in their base’s equivalent of a breakroom (it was actually a broken down transpo vehicle that some of the lower level resistance fighters had painted and put chairs in in a desperate attempt to make it look more ‘homey’) having, you guessed it; a break. ZiM-12 was even holding a mug, although there wasn’t anything in it. He just liked how holding it made him look, and the general atmosphere it created.

The two droids were the only synthetic beings in the base—or possibly even in the entire resistance—to be afforded any actual break time.

And they deserved it, too. They were two of the most respectable droids in the entire galaxy. They had killed countless higher level imperial leaders, and had avenged the deaths of many of their resistance brethren. They were inspirations to droids everywhere, and the heroes of many human resistance fighters as well.

And boy did they know it. ZiM-12 never missed a chance to remind the other fighters of just how much good he’d done for the resistance. EST-VZ, being a bit newer in model and having lesser in, managed to hold back on his hubris; but only when compared to his partner.

Suddenly and without warning, a pilot that they didn’t recognize—still fully dressed in his bulky flight suit and clearly very winded—burst into the makeshift breakroom. He stared at the two of them without saying anything for a moment as he caught his breath.

“Th-the,” He panted, pointing out the still-swinging doors of the room.

“Spit it out, son.” Said ZiM-12, not unkindly, but urgently.

“The general, General Spring. He-he’s dead.”

~~~

LOCATION: unknown.

Wherever Farah was, it was extremely hot. When she came to the heat was the first thing she noticed; her breath was suffocating her within her helmet. Even through her heavily insulated suit she could feel the heat, coming from everywhere and nowhere in particular.

Her eyes were taking forever to adjust to the darkness, and it didn’t help that the visor on her suit was still down, fogging up with her every panicked breath.

As her eyes adjusted she realized that the visor had a piece of tape put over the front, as if someone had tried to gag her but hadn’t been smart enough to take off her helmet to reach her mouth.

Farah attempted to prop herself up on her elbow, discovering a couple things in the process. First of all; both her legs and her hands were bound, but only very loosely. Second of all; she was hurt, and bad. Her chest screamed every time she moved. She had clearly broken at least one rib.

Farah groaned as she struggled to sit up the rest of the way. Everything felt like it was happening in slow motion, like she was sitting in a vat of molasses. She had to painstakingly instruct her brain to do each action step-by-step, as if it had forgotten how to do anything.

Step two was to take off her helmet. Well, that shouldn’t be too hard; her arms were bound in front of her and she’d done it a million times before. Farah reached forward, feeling her ribs scrape as she did it. She tried not to wonder how much damage she was doing to her body, and how much work it would take to reverse it.

Farah was relieved to hear her helmet depressurize as it slipped off her head. Her breathing became a lot less beleaguered in the process.

She could see around the room much better now, finding that it was not in fact pitch black but was actually bathed in dark red light.

Step three was going to be much more difficult, Farah knew that for sure. 

Step three was to escape the room.

~~~

LOCATION: the only occupied spot for thousands of miles around in the vacuum of space

When Todd finally got back from the bathroom—slightly wetter than he had been going in—he didn’t at first notice the gangly figure standing in the middle of the control room. Once again, Todd wasn’t the most perceptive guy in the galaxy. He was, at that point, too invested in his own unpleasant disposition; he was feeling just as soggy on the inside as he was out.

When he eventually did notice the figure, who was staring at him intently like a curious animal, his first instinct was of course to hit him with the crowbar still grasped in his hand.

However, this time Todd didn’t get to finish his action; his stowaway’s arm shot out to stop the crowbar from ever reaching its destination.

“Stop!” Yelled the mystery man, his voice breaking frantically.

So, against his better judgment, Todd did stop. Suddenly he and the stranger were in a standoff, eyes locked.

“What are you doing here?” Todd panted. It hit him that he couldn’t really think of a reason why someone would want to break into his ship; only a very stupid thief would think that there was actually anything of value on his sad little transpo.

“I’m not a  _ criminal _ or anything, honest.” insisted the stowaway, who threw up his hands in a show of surrender. Todd scoffed, fighting the urge to say ‘that makes one of us’. It didn’t  _ matter  _ whether this man was a criminal or not, at least not much. What mattered was that any civilian who found their way onto the ship would come dangerously close to discover the many ways in which  _ Todd  _ was currently breaking the law.

“So who are you then?” Todd inquired instead. The man looked bewildered for a moment, as if he hadn’t quite given this particular question any thought before. Todd knew the feeling.

“I, um…I’m a psychic.” The man said finally.

Now it was Todd’s turn to be bewildered, because what the fuck kind of answer is that?  _ A psychic? Like in kid’s books where Jedi still existed and fairy tales were real? _

Todd finally realized how long he had been contemplating this answer (although it was an answer very worthy of contemplation).

“So you’re like…one of those force weirdos?” Todd hadn’t wanted his reply to come out this way, but not offending this stowaway wasn’t exactly his first priority.

“What? No. Okay, I said the wrong thing… I…” He straightened his back, suddenly standing a good three inches taller than Todd. “I’m a businessman.” He finished, sounding only slightly more composed.

Todd glared up at him. “Well if you’re a fucking  _ entrepreneur _ then what are you  _ doing  _ on my  _ ship _ ?”

The stowaway looked uncomfortable. “I…I’m here by accident. I didn’t mean to get on your ship, I promise.” – _ Like a promise means anything coming from you,  _ Todd thought—“I was running from some people, I just ran into the first door I saw and it led me here. If you’re willing to just take me back to Wyvern I’ll be out of your hair.”

Todd considered this answer for a moment. He knew he had the high ground in this situation; he was the one holding a crowbar after all. It just…seemed too simple a solution.

Todd lowered his crowbar slowly, keeping his eyes locked with the other man, who looked relieved. He pulled his hands away and began to tenderly rub the dark purple bruise that Todd had given him.

“I’m Dirk, by the way.” He said, suddenly smiling as if the last forty minutes had simply been a bad misunderstanding.

“Todd.” He spat back.

Just as Todd got ready to take the ship out of warp and turn around to go back to Wyvern, they received a comm. Todd looked to find the name ‘Dorian’ flashing across the screen in whatever alien language the ship had come pre-programmed to speak (they hadn’t figured out what language it was or how to change the setting of the ship, resorting to learning only the bare minimum it took to operate the thing). Todd wondered for the third time that day what if felt like to die.

“Who’s it from?” Asked Dirk sweetly—he was now sitting cross-legged in the copilot chair, spinning himself around like a child allowed for once to sit in his dad’s office chair.

“None of your business.” Todd groused.

He pushed the button and in a moment the loud grumbles of an inconvenienced Wookie graced every speaker in the ship. As Todd listened to the message he pondered the fact that no matter what language you spoke, the sound of unbridled anger was universal.

Once again, Todd’s Wookie comprehension wasn’t perfect, but he did recognize the words approximating “this is the last straw” and “I’m coming for you, you little twat”. Todd felt a chill down his spine.

Dirk looked at him with eyes like a puppy as Todd stood frozen in place, hand still hovering over the comm.

“Who was that?” He asked. “Because whoever it was, they did  _ not  _ sound happy.”

Todd turned rigidly to look at Dirk. “We can’t go back to Wyvern.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave any comments/ideas/theories. Hopefully The next chapter will be up in a week, but I need some reinforcement to make that happen!


	4. Petrichor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two kidnapping victims become better acquainted with their situations

LOCATION: unknown

Amanda didn’t know where she was, and she hated the feeling. She was shivering, cold sweat coating her body, but she wasn’t cold.

She was warm, actually, really warm. This was a first for Amanda-a side effect of her disease was that she was constantly cold, not matter how many layers she wore at any time. She’d been cold for so long that she’d forgotten what being truly warm felt like.

She was wrapped in what she estimated to be at least five layers of scratchy wool blankets. The whole situation reminded her eerily of when she’d gotten a cold as a kid and her grandmother had taken care of her.

She  _ didn’t _ have a cold, though. That she was sure of—but she did have  _ something _ . She recalled her vision. The ghosts accosting her as she convulsed, alone on her bed. It would’ve seemed totally normal, just another day of living with the disease, if it hadn’t been for one thing;

She hadn’t been alone, actually. Someone--more than one someone--had been there with her.

And that’s how Amanda ended up with a mile-wide bruise on the top of her head as jolted into the sitting position out of surprise, only to be greeted by a ceiling that was much lower than she’d estimated it to be.

She couldn’t focus on her new injury, however; she had much more important things to think about.

_ She  _ had been  _ kidnapped. _

The idea seemed wholly alien to her. Kidnapping had always been something that happened to  _ other people _ . Besides, she hadn’t ever thought of herself as the kind of person who was worth kidnapping.

She decided to try getting up again, this time much more carefully. She found it strange that she wasn’t bound in any way, only swaddled in blankets.

She discovered herself to be in one of those sleeping compartments, the kind that are shaped like unappealing drawers that they put in ships too small to have actual beds.

Amanda pushed against the wall, finding it all too easy to open the drawer herself and climb out; the only hard part being getting herself untangled from the five differently patterned blankets wrapped around her.

Amanda eventually managed to get out, her feet meeting the cold metal floor of a room holding six drawer-beds, including her own (and bringing into stark relief the fact that she wasn’t wearing shoes. Despite the freezing metal floor, however, Amanda stayed just as warm as she had been when wrapped in blankets). Only four of the other beds seemed to have been used recently, though, each surrounded by the belongings of the person she assumed slept in each bed. None of the beds seemed to have blankets, though, and Amanda could guess why.

She stood in the middle of the room for a while, feeling totally bewildered at her situation. She’d been kidnapped, as she’d already established, but by who? What kind of kidnappers took care of the people they kidnapped so thoroughly? Where the people who Amanda had seen in her room, the ones with the hauntingly glowing eyes, the same ones who had brought her onto this ship?

At that moment Amanda would’ve shivered if she hadn’t been so damn warm. 

~~~

LOCATION: space. Coincidentally close to the planet Leviathan

 

The person who had operatively kidnapped Ken from the surface of B-17 was…weird. That was the only way Ken could think to describe them, although the word seemed totally deficient in labeling this person. Ken could’ve spent hours trying to find the perfect words to describe how unbelievably  _ strange _ they were, but he didn’t really have the time to do that. He was busy being kidnapped.

The person said their name was Bart, which seemed weird in a way that Ken couldn’t quite put his finger on—it definitely didn’t seem like a real name.

They smelled weird, too—not quite bad, but dirty like earth after rain. The entire ship was coated in their smell.  They also looked weird, like they hadn’t showered in years. Their body language was that of a lumbering predator and they hardly ever made eye contact, obviously unused to being around another person (when they did make eye contact, however, their gaze made Ken feel like he finally knew what it was like to know you could be killed at any moment, a feeling he’d never in his life planned to get acquainted with). 

The person refused to tell him their destination, leaving him to eventually assume that they didn’t have one. They seemed to, essentially, be floating aimlessly in space; pointing the ship in a direction and then letting the autopilot do the rest.

They hardly ever talked, too. The silence was crushing at times. They would look at him, though, every once and awhile. They’d glance at him questioningly at times they thought he wasn’t looking, leaving him to wonder what kind of puzzle they were trying to solve in his face.

Ken couldn’t tell whether he wanted to break the silence or not. It was oppressive, sure; long and empty and unfulfilling. Not that Ken wasn’t used to prolonged silences—because he definitely was—but this silence was especially bad, as silences go. Ken didn’t know how much longer he would last without some kind of interaction.

“So, where are we going?” he asked.

Ken was sitting propped against the wall of the cockpit, surprisingly relaxed for someone who had been full-on kidnapped less than a day earlier. His captor had long since abandoned the idea of keeping him in handcuffs. Ken didn’t dare consider fighting back, after all they did have a gun (whereas he did not). They were at a bit of a stalemate in that department.

The person’s body language didn’t respond and for a moment Ken wondered if they’d even heard him.

“Just anywhere.” They responded finally. “I need to find  _ Dirk Gently. _ ” They said the name like it belonged to someone they’d met long ago but whose face they could not longer remember.

“Yeah, but who is he? And what are you going to do when you find him?”

“I don’t know who he is, I just know that I need to find him. I do know what I’m going to do when I do find him, though.” Suddenly Ken could almost hear the smile that was definitely occupying their face, despite their not facing him. “I’m going to kill him.”

Ken didn’t know why hearing this person say these words chilled him so thoroughly—he had already seen them shoot his supervisor square in the head after all—but something about the way they said it made him want to jump out of his skin.

“But…but how are you going to  _ kill him  _ if you don’t know how to  _ find him _ ?” He asked, hoping to get some insight into the workings of his captor’s mind.

“Because I just know where to go. The forces of the universe tell me where I should go and then  _ he’ll  _ be wherever that is.”

Ken took a moment to process what they was saying, making sure that he had heard their right. “So, you use  _ The Force  _ to figure out where to find him?”

“The forces of the universe. That’s what I said.”

“No.  _ The  _ Force. Y’know…”

To be perfectly honest, Ken didn’t know much about The Force in the traditional sense. He wasn’t even that sure he believed in it; in fact, he knew that he didn’t. He had heard stories like everyone else had when he was little but he didn’t remember much. He’d never really cared for spiritual-type stuff. He preferred definite things--numbers, hardware--things he could trust to be there for him 100% of the time. Things he could fix when they fell apart.

“People used to think it held the universe together or whatever. And, at least as far as I know, there were people who…who could control it. People who let it guide them through their life or whatever. Jedi.”

Bart shrugged. “That doesn’t sound right. This is something different.”

Ken threw his hands up, palms facing the sky. “I just described  _ exactly  _ what you’re talking about.” Bart simply shrugged him off once again.

Ken was about to make a rebuttal when something through the window caught his eye.

He bolted upright and ran up to the window to make sure what he was seeing was correct. It was extremely hard to spot anything amongst the giant expanses of space, but even then the flashing city lights of Leviathan were hard to miss, covering every part of the planet it inhabited with its giant buildings and spidering streets. The planet truly lived up to it’s name in every sense.

“There.” He said pointing to spot on the screen that was occupied by the planet. “Leviathan. I used to live there when I was younger.”

Bart didn’t look up from the console. “Is it nice there?”

Ken scoffed. “Hell no. It’s an absolute shithole to be perfectly honest. I do love it, though, and no other place I’ve lived has ever really made me feel the same, but that might just be the nostalgia talking--” Ken trailed off as he was forced to hold tightly onto the copilot chair because suddenly the ship was veering off course. He looked down to find that Bart had twisted the controls all the way to the left, sending them on a collision course with the city of Leviathan.

“What the  _ fuck  _ are we doing now?” He said, his voice strained as his fingers left dents in the upholstery of the copilot chair.

“We’re going to Leviathan.” They said concretely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave any comments/ideas/theories. Hopefully The next chapter will be up in a week, but I need some reinforcement to make that happen!


	5. Fear

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An already tense situation worsens

LOCATION: unknown, painful

Farah tore away at the ropes binding her with her pointed teeth, giving up pretty quickly and knowing that she was doing more damage to her own teeth than to the ropes themselves.

She resisted the urge to slam herself against the wall of the tiny room, knowing that it would only serve to worsen her injuries rather than lessen her anger. She instead screamed out into the darkness of the room until her voice became hoarse.

Farah tried to remember what had happened before her capture but the memories felt locked in some deep cellar, the key of which she’d thrown away long ago.

She remembered her and General Spring’s operation being discovered, against all odds. They’d been attacked right at their base, disregarding how much trouble Farah had gone through to keep it secure. 

She remembered screaming.

She shivered despite the heat, hoping beyond all hope that General Spring had met a safer fate than her.

~~~

LOCATION: resistance lunchroom, still

“He’s where?” said Zim, hoping that he’d heard wrong despite his impeccable hearing.

The young lieutenant rubbed his arms as if a chill had run through the room. “He…he’s in his suite. But, he’s dead of course…”

“So he died in his suite?”

The lieutenant shivered again. “You’ll have to…just come see.”

The suite, part of a cluster of different resistance-owned buildings, was a couple of miles off of the base and kept even better hidden than the base itself. It was where they kept some of the most important pieces of resistance equipment and information, and General Spring was considered one of those pieces.

After arriving at the general’s suite, Zim and Est-vz were hesitant to step inside. They’d never been inside the suite itself before, owing half to the fact that they were droids and therefore had restricted clearance to many parts of the base and half to the fact that no one of rank lower than general had ever been over the threshold, other than Spring’s own personal bodyguards.

The two droids surveyed the scene, Est-vz trying to imagine how nice it would’ve looked had everything not been soaked in blood.

They found their way over to the body, sprawled out at all angles from where it lay on the ground. Est-vz stood there in shock for a moment, staring down at the body. He’d always idolized the General a bit, most people in the rebellion did.

Zim, however, moved right to examining the body for clues. After a single glance he looked up to the young pilot who had brought them there. A couple of the employees had begun to cluster behind him in order to stare slack-jawed at their boss’s corpse, but Zim didn’t bother to address them.

“He has no wounds.” he stated robotically, an adverb that’s amazingly fitting when you think about it.

It was true. Est-vz let his eyes skim the body in front of him to find that while it was covered in splashes of blood it did not, in fact, have any noticeable wounds.

“Y-yeah.” Replied the pilot.

“Yeah? Well? Why?” Zim snapped back. “All of this blood had to have come from somewhere.” Zim motioned to the considerable amount of blood that occupied spots around the room as if he might’ve forgotten it was there when in fact it was quite hard to ignore.

“Well, actually, he does have _a_ wound.” Said the pilot shakily. If Zim had possessed eyebrows he would’ve raised them. This young pilot was beginning to get on his nerves with all this withholding of information he was doing.

“Show me.”

The pilot reached down and grasped the general’s limp arm, which was already stiffening. He turned it over, exposing the inside of the elbow and with it a small red mark positioned on top of one of the bulging purple veins. The sign that a syringe had at one point found its way to the general’s arm in the minutes before his death, soon enough to still leave a mark even after he was dead.

Zim and Est-vz both bent down to look at it but didn’t say anything. The pilot let there be a moment of suspense before speaking again.

“It is believed that the general injected himself with some kind of deadly toxin. That was what killed him.” He stifled a smile, clearly a bit tickled by the fact that two of the better minds in the rebellion were just as stumped as he was.

Zim was stiff, stiffer than he usually was, at least; especially for a droid.

“Well. Why… why would he do that? And if so. Where the _fuck_ did all this blood come from?” Zim urged. Est-vz remained silent.

The pilot paused once again for the sake of dramatic tension. He took a deep breath, deeper than needed.

“We don’t know.”

Est-vz clenched his stiff metal hand. If he had had traditional shoulders he would’ve tensed them. The whole situation was making him extremely uneasy, and he looked uncertainly up at his stoic partner to confirm that his feelings were justified. Zim nodded when he knew the young pilot couldn’t see.

Zim turned again to the pilot; “Anything else?” He asked hastily, ready to get out of this room and stop having to look at his boss’ lifeless corpse.

The pilot thought for a moment before his face lit up. “Right! The Droid!” he barked, before doing a 180 turn to go into a room deeper into the general’s suite.

He came back out a moment later, his arms overflowing with a bag full of what appeared to be a rabid animal. He struggled more and more intensely in each moment with trying to keep the animal contained until it eventually escaped his grasp, landing bag and all on the floor with a thick metallic thud strong enough to have cracked the tile flooring. Everyone in the room jumped away from the possibly dangerous bagged animal.

The thing moved around a bit like a dog trying to escape a blanket someone had thrown over it. It then gave up and bolted unwaveringly forward before being stopped abruptly by an inconveniently placed wall. It continued to slam itself against the wall with enough determination that it almost convinced you that the wall might eventually budge.

Zim eventually decided he was tired of watching this whole ordeal and stepped exasperatedly over to the wall, scooping the small round bagged thing off of the ground.

He peeled off the canvas bag to reveal a very small bb unit, white and black with gold decals. Zim felt something inside him whir when he looked at it, and he couldn’t help but feel anger towards the young pilot for keeping the poor thing in a bag like that.

“Is this general’s bb unit, then?” inquired Est-vz of the pilot, his partner being sidetracked by his inspection of the droid for scuffs or injuries. It was a really nice droid, too, the kind that you might get for a spoiled child or in order to carry around like an accessory. Zim lifted it over his head to read the name on the barcode.

‘bb-rz’ it read. He spoke the name to himself, too quiet for anyone else in the room to hear.

The pilot shrugged. “Not as far as we know. General Spring never owned a bb-unit. This one…this one is believed to have belonged to Springs daughter, who you remember went missing a couple days ago.” Est-vz and Zim nodded in solidarity “She lives off-planet, though, so it’s believed the unit was brought here by whoever the source of all this blood was.” He motioned around the room as if they might’ve possibly forgotten the stains were there.

If he had had a spine, Zim would’ve felt a chill run down it just then, although he couldn’t tell why for the life of him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave any comments/ideas/theories. Hopefully The next chapter will be up in a week, but I need some reinforcement to make that happen!


	6. Beginnings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The plot thickens

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Starting here I've decided to start making the chapters around twice as long, so enjoy!

“Why the fuck can’t we go back to Wyvern?” Asked Dirk, his voice breaking ever so slightly. His swearing a sudden lapse of his relentless cheerfulness of the last hour since appearing on Todd’s ship. Beads of sweat were beginning to form visibly on his brow.

Todd rubbed the back of his neck hard enough to give himself a rash that he probably deserved.

“So, uh, you probably can’t speak Wookie but… long story short I’m in some  _ very _ deep shit and if I do go back there, well. It won’t be pretty.”

Dirk didn’t seem to comprehend. “So? I don’t care how un-pretty it’ll be! I _live_ there and I _need_ to get back.”

Todd paused and looked up at his stowaway bluntly. “Dirk, by ‘it won’t be pretty’ I mean that I probably won’t be able to make it off of Wyvern alive if I decide to go back.”

Dirk hesitated before sitting back in the copilot’s chair and sighing heavily. He debated in his head for a moment how much he really cared if Todd lived or not, but only for a moment.

“So… _why_ is this Wookie so _mad_ at you?”

Todd stiffened up, directing his line of sight away from Dirk and towards the ship’s screens, despite them being occupied only by a the inky abyss of space. Truthfully he just needed something to look at. “I uh…I owe him money.” 

He paused, trying to find the exact words to indicate the magnitude of the situation. “Like,  _ a lot  _ of money.”

Dirk smiled slightly, spreading his arms. “So. All we have to do is… _give_ him the money. Problem solved.”

Todd looked at Dirk again questioningly. “Well, I don’t _have_ the money, “ He lied. “That’s…kinda the point.”

“Well, how can you _get_ the money?”

Todd though for the moment, ignoring his slight anger towards his stowaway, who he thought was acting quite entitled. _He should be thankful that he isn’t_ dead, _the location at which not-deadness is taking place shouldn’t matter._ “Well, I do have a contact on Leviathan who owes me.” Todd admitted begrudgingly. He had been waiting to call in that favor for an absolutely dire situation, not quite yet willing to admit that his current situation could be considered “dire”.

Dirk’s face lit up. “So. Let’s go there. To...where did you say?”

Todd raised his eyebrows. “You’ve never heard of the city of  _ Leviathan  _ before? Y’know, the  _ largest known city in this leg of the galaxy? _ ” He asked. He was surprised by the incredulity but found it totally warranted.

Dirk blushed “I, uh. I don’t get out much.”

Todd shrugged. “Well, it’s really not that far from Wyvern. We can just drop by my friend ‘s place and come right back here…boom, problem solved.”

 

~~~

 

LOCATION: unknown ship

Amanda weighed her fear of what she would find outside the door against her fear of what would happen if she stayed in the room for another twenty minutes. Her boredom made a pretty good argument on the side of leaving the room and eventually convinced her to crack the door open a bit.

She was met with the sight of a long, dark metal hallway. She’d long since guessed that she was on some kind of ship, and the machinery and unlit lights that lined this hallway only helped to confirm that fact.

She opened the door bit by bit, thanking the gods for the lack of creaking. Her foot met the floor, finding it to be shockingly cold

She tip-toed down the hallway, her journey being satisfactorily silent.

There were multiple doors at the end of the hallway. One of them led to the airlock (as evidenced by the fact that it had a large sign next to it reading ‘airlock’ and–if that weren’t enough to clue one in–an airtight seal). The other door was locked and stayed that way no matter how hard she pulled on it, abandoning stealth. To her horror there was only one door left, and based on the light streaming from the bottom of the door she was absolutely positive her captors would be behind it.

She tried to turn the door handle silently, but it apparently had other plans re: creaking shrilly as she turned it. This made Amanda give up on her hope of stealth and as an alternative decided to burst into through the door with as much force as she had in her tiny body, hoping instead to catch her captors by surprise.

Amanda pushed the door open as fast as she possible, only to have herself be stopped in her tracks by what appeared at first to be a wall, but after closer investigation turned out to be the wide chest of a dark, looming figure standing above her.

For a long, terrifying moment all she was a wide, toothy grin. Later on when she would look back on this particular moment she would be able to visualize eyes, nose, and hair, but in that instant all she saw was a smile.

“HaHa! Blue Girl is awake!” Yelled a manic voice to her right. She felt two different arms grip her on either side and bring her deeper into the room.

~~~

LOCATION: unknown

Farah had been hearing footsteps going back and forth in front of the door for a while. She didn’t know which she dreaded more: the sound of footsteps moving or the sound of them stopping.

Every time she heard a set of footsteps, or even multiple sets of footsteps stop abruptly her stomach would drop; the feeling of nausea that the heat and lighting had already instilled in her intensifying tenfold.

She couldn’t tell for the life of her how long she’d been in the cell, but it was a safe bet that it’d been longer than a day. Maybe even two. The only thing Farah thought about over that time was escape, absentmindedly picking away at her restraints at every extra moment.

Every time she heard footsteps approaching her door Farah’s hearts came within a hair’s width of stopping, until they finally did opened the door.

 

~~~

LOCATION: Somewhere above Leviathan

Ken’s stomach dropped as the ship on which he was being held hostage skyrocketed towards Leviathan at an absolutely ludicrous speed. Ken could almost see the fabric of reality outside the ship warping slightly, despite the fact that as far as Ken knew Bart hadn’t activated the warp drive at all. He could almost feel his feet being lifted off of the ground they were moving so quickly downwards, but Bart was so determined that they didn’t seem to notice any of this, held in place by their own personal circle of gravity.

The ship slowed down a bit eventually, but only a bit. Bart violently punched some instructions into the keyboard and sat back relaxedly in their chair as if the fabric of reality inside the ship hadn’t just been lightly nudged down a very steep cliff.

Ken fell to the ground ass first, dropping with him all hopes of keeping his composure in front of this person.

“Why.” *pant* “Are we going.” *pant* “To Leviathan.” *pant*.

Bart shrugged. “I dunno. I…heard you say that you recognized it, and I felt like it was someplace we needed to go. Maybe you’re a sign the universe is sending me.” They spun around in the captain’s chair. They were sitting cross-legged, arms rigid. That, combined with their messy pigtails, gave them the aura of an manic little kid. An extremely manic, _extremely_ _homicidal_ little kid.

“I’ve never met someone who actually recognizes planets and, like, knows their names and shit.” They paused to think for a second. “Do they all got names?”

“Most of them, yeah.” Said Ken, holding back his incredulity. Any normal person knows that almost every planet has some kind of moniker, but he didn’t have to be reminded that Bart was not in any way a normal person.

“The one I picked you up from got a name?”

Ken thought that saying Bart had “Picked him up” from B-17 was a bit generous, but he didn’t bother stating this out loud.

“Yeah. B-17.”

Bart pouted. “That’s not a very interesting name.”

Ken shrugged. “Well it wasn’t a very interesting planet, was it?” He said, the spite so obvious in his voice that he could almost taste the sourness of it.

Bart turned their way away from Ken and towards Leviathan, which they were still approaching with alarming speed. “Do you recognize any of this?” they asked, motioning towards the planet.

Ken stood and inspected the ship’s screens, which displayed a zoomed-in version of their destination.

“I mean, it’s a whole planet. It’s not like I can show you which apartment building I lived in from here.”

Bart didn’t reply, but looked disappointed. Ken sighed and inspected the surface of the planet that was currently hurtling towards them. He eventually pressed his finger to the brightest spot on the screen, among all the other bright spots.

“See that?” Bart simply nodded, transfixed.

“That is the main hub of the entire city. I lived about twenty miles from there. There was a rumor that one of the most important rebellion hubs in the galaxy is stationed around there, but nobody really knows where it is, the city is so big.”

Despite their normally very gruff demeanor, Bart couldn’t quite hide their delight. They punched Ken on the arm, hard. He felt his heart stop for a moment in fear.

“I like ya, Ken.” They laughed.

Ken paused a moment to recover from their epic shoulder punch. “What? Why?”

“I ain’t gotten to hear someone’s voice for this long in…” The gears in Bart’s head were visibly turning. “Five years? Ten? All I’m sayin is, it’s nice.” They punctuated their sentence with another smile and then turned away from him again.

Ken looked at them for a moment, expecting more. He finally realized that in their own way Bart had unceremoniously declared the conversation over.

##  ~~~

LOCATION: The secret resistance base on Leviathan

Zim and Est-vz weren’t making a lot of headway in their investigation,

This wasn’t to say they weren’t smart, they were just as smart as any human being, but even the smartest of humans wouldn’t’ve had a _great_ time figuring out this particular mystery.

Est-vz and Zim sat back in their private shared quarters, reviewing once again what little information they already had. Zim lay, mechanical legs crossed, on his bed (a bed which, I might add, served no practical purpose in the room, seeing that droids don’t require sleep. Est-vz, on the other hand, was pacing back and forth across the worn out floor of their room, a floor that was worn out from him having done this exact movement countless times before. pacing, once again, is another thing that droids don’t naturally need).

The bb unit—bb-rz—which they still hadn’t figured out what to do with, whirred excitedly across the floor, weaving between Est-vz’s legs as if actively trying to trip him.

“So.” Stated Est-vz for the fifth time that night.

“So.” Echoed Zim absentmindedly, for the sixth time that night. Est-vz stopped pacing abruptly.

“Here’s what we found out earlier: General Spring died at or around four o’clock this afternoon. He was most likely accosted by multiple people, as evidenced by the amount of blood in the room. Spring likely fought off these intruders before his death, but these intruders are not what killed him. It is more likely that Spring injected himself with a deadly toxin that ended up killing him, as opposed to dying at the hands of his accosters. The reason he did this is not known, however,”

“I think he did it to hide information.” Said Zim nonchalantly, thinking that if he didn’t stop Est-vz’s rambling now he might never stop at all.

“What?” inquired Est-vz, clearly shocked at having to stop his rambling.

“To hide information.” Restated Zim. “The intruders probably wanted information about the rebellion out of Spring, so he killed himself so that they couldn’t torture the information out of him.”

Est-vz considered this point for a moment before nodding and adding it to the list of things he knew. He then continued his blathering.

“We also found out that this bb-unit was left at the scene, probably by the same people who killed Spring, since this unit has not been seen by anyone on this base before today.” Est-vz paused. If he had had lungs, he would’ve at this point stopped to catch his breath. “On a possibly related, possibly coincidental note, Springs daughter went missing a week or so ago,” 

“That’s what we knew then. This is what we’ve found out since then; it is believed that Spring had been crying at some point in the hours or possibly minutes before his death, as evidenced by his reddened eyes and the rings of tears around them. Or at least, so I heard. Secondly and more importantly; General Spring’s pilot, bodyguard, and second in command, lieutenant Farah Black, has been found to also have gone missing.”

Est-vz stopped his pacing and stared down at bb-rz introspectively, as if the thing would just begin spouting answers. It didn’t; it just simply stared back with a similarly introspective expression. In the hours since discovering the murder, they had established this bb unit to be very stupid, even for it’s make.

“You missed the most interesting part. Well, _parts._ At least, I think it’s the most interesting.” Zim said after a pause. Est-vz looked down at him questioningly.

“Where Spring bought the poison, the one that killed him. He bought it from a smuggler that’s stationed here on Leviathan sometimes. The poison was so strong that he couldn’t just get it from the resistance, but instead had to buy it illegally. It’s believed that he bought it a couple months ago, since that smuggler is believed to currently be stationed on Wyvern.”

“So?”

“You didn’t let me finish. The _so_ of it, the reason it’s so interesting, is because the employee that is believed to have sold Spring the poison went _missing_ very recently.”

“And what was the second part.”

“The second part is that, days before his death Patrick Spring apparently wrote a memo containing the words ‘beware the worm’, although he didn’t send it and the intended recipient is unknown.”

Zim and his partner then made the same whirring sound at the same time; it was a sound of realization, although a realization of _what_ neither of them really knew.

“God, why did he have to be so fucking  _ cryptic _ ?”

Just then, a young uniformed individual burst into the room for the second time that day. It wasn’t the same one, however, and was this time a young woman from their base’s patrol force.

The best way to hide your high profile resistance base in one of the most bustling cities in the galaxy is to hide it in plain sight. The base on Leviathan did this by masquerading as a freelance police force.

The only downside to this was that in order to masquerade as a freelance police force you also kind of have to do some freelance policing at times.

“We’ve, uh, brought someone in.” Gasped the woman.

“So, why should we care?” Asked Zim before his partner had a chance to respond.

“It pertains to the case you’re working on. We believe it might be the employee of the smuggler, the one who sold General Spring the poison. Todd Brotzman.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave any comments/ideas/theories. Hopefully The next chapter will be up in a week, but I need some reinforcement to make that happen!


	7. Realization

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> some unfortunate things come to light

LOCATION: space. Crazy I know.

        “You’re a what?”

        Todd sat rigid in the pilot’s chair, attempting to make himself look as small as possible, something he often did when he was feeling embarrassed. It took him a while to respond do Dirk’s question.

Dirk made a disapproving sound in the back of his throat. This small rodent-like man was really getting on his nerves.

        “I’m not going to _judge_ you. I just want to make sure I heard you right.”

        Todd drew in his shoulders. “I’m, uh, a smuggler.” Dirk raised his eyebrows, and Todd, seeing his expression, scrambled to take it back.

        “I mean, I’m not _just_ a smuggler.” He squeaked. “I’m a musician, too.” He motioned to an unimpressive pile of wood held together by bits of string that Dirk had only just realized was supposed to be an instrument.

       “Whatever. I’ve stopped caring what people think about my job” _except for Amanda_ he thought. If his sister ever found out what he did then he’d probably never hear from her again.

He sighed, with an expression that promptly told Dirk ‘ _don’t push_ it’

“And what about you?” Todd continued, eager to take the focus of attention off of himself. “What the fuck did you say you were? A psychic?”

        Where he had previously been unsure, Dirk now decided to stand his ground. “That’s right. Well, mostly right.” He paused, seeing how confused Todd’s expression was already becoming. Dirk shut his eyes as he sometimes did when he was attempting to focus his thoughts, an act that was even harder for Dirk than it was for most people. “It’s more like… like I can tune into the universe, and it…it tells me things. Like that. But I can’t really control it or use it to help myself.” He attempted to compose himself, spreading his palms out as if he were a priest about to give a sermon. “I believe in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.”

        Todd’s expression remained skeptical. The “fundamental interconnectedness” bit sounded fake, as well as strangely cultlike.

“So, like, force shit?”

        Dirk’s eyes snapped open. “ _What?_ ”

        Todd had to admit that this was weird, weirder than any of the other things his accidental passenger had said in the hours since they’d known each other. Everyone knew about the Force—at least, that’s what Todd had thought up until this point—even him, someone who had never really _believed_ in anything.

        Dirk’s whole shtick definitely seemed made up, but what were the chances that he would fabricate something so complicated without also claiming to be a force user?

        “ _You don’t know what the force is?_ ” He asked, the astonishment in his voice unexpected but, he believed, warranted.

        Now it was Dirk’s turn to draw into himself, his shoulders moving towards his ears.

        “Like I said.” He said quietly; “I don’t get out much.”

        Despite this being a wholly unsatisfying answer, Todd had had enough experience with people to know that pressing harder probably wouldn’t get him anything other than anger at the moment.

        There was silence for a couple moments (moments here being placed somewhere between minutes and seconds) before Todd hazarded a glance back at Dirk, to find that he was staring directly at him with unabashed curiosity.  Todd stared back hard before realizing that this was probably as good a time as any for Dirk to learn what the force actually _was._ Dirk, he finally realized, wasn’t ‘people’.

        Todd hated having to teach people things they should already know, but what he hated even more was how obligated he felt to teach Dirk about the force, a subject he himself already knew so little about. He sighed, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward in his chair.

        “So, the force-” Dirk’s expression perked up almost immediately “-was like…So there were these dudes—and girls, too, I guess—called, uh, the Jedi.” Todd could already sense that his composure was falling apart, but Dirk’s excited expression remained the same.

        “So, the Jedi were like, these religious leaders. Like, like monks and shit. And they believed that The Force was like, this energy that held the whole universe together. Pretty normal religion stuff so far, right?” Todd could feel the knowledge from the history classes he took as a kid returning to him now; “Except, these Jedi believed that they could _control_ The Force. And that like, The Force was some kind of almost, alive—no… a _sentient_ thing that would like, talk to them, and tell them when other Jedi were in trouble and shit.”

        Over the course of Todd’s soliloquy Dirk’s eyes had grown wide. “And what kind of things could the Jedi use the force to do, might I ask?” He inquired, the slight waver in his voice making it clear how much of this was hitting home for him.       

        “Eh, it was different from Jedi to Jedi, I think. Some of them could use it to control people’s minds, some could tell the future, some could like, levitate shit, I think. And some used it to get, like, really good at fighting. I always thought that was really cool when I was younger.”

        Dirk finally broke eye contact and shrugged. “Well, then no. None of that sounds like me. This must be something different.” That was what he said, but his expression, the way his rosy lips quivered when he spoke, told an entirely different story. What that story was, exactly, Todd wasn’t sure.

        Once again Todd was left feeling pretty skeptical about every other word out of Dirk’s mouth. While he had established so far that Dirk was pretty physically non-menacing, he still hadn’t been able to measure his capacity for lying. For Todd, this ability had more power to hurt than any blaster gun.

        He scoffed. “Well, that’s good, since The Force isn’t actually like, real. At least, _I_ don’t think it is. Plus, all of the Jedi are supposed to have died out hundreds of years ago. Hell, I’m not even sure if _they_ were real in the first place, magic or no.”

        At this point it appeared that Dirk had pretty much stopped listening.

        “However, uh…Is there, by chance, a way to _test_ one’s, uh, force sensitivity?” Dirk asked introspectively.

        While Todd was a little bit irked at being ignored, he couldn’t say it wasn’t something he was used to. He was about to answer with a ‘no’ before he remembered the box he’d seen nestled in the room where they kept all the spare parts.

        “Well, actually…” He turned got up and turned to go out the door leading out of the cockpit; “Dor—my boss used to collect these, uh, things. Said they used to be really expensive and valuable, that the Jedi used to travel millions of miles just to get them. They’re worth zilch now, though.” Todd smiled slightly before remembering that the same business partner whose shenanigans were so amusing was the same one who was currently trying to kill him.

“He was always trying to snort them.” He yelled back into the cockpit as he dug through the giant pile of spare parts, attempting to retrieve the box without destroying the delicate ecosystem of haphazardly stacked pieces of metal he’d created. Dirk remained uncharacteristically silent.

        He soon returned to the cockpit, a small glowing rock sitting comfortably in the palm of his hand. If Todd hadn’t known better he would’ve said that the thing was giving off its own heat.

        He walked up to Dirk, so fixated by the stone that he hadn’t noticed where Dirk’s eyes were directed.

“If there’s anything that’ll tell you if you’re force sensitive, then it’s probably this…”

        He finally followed Dirk’s gaze, which was directed at the ship’s screens, each of which displayed the dusty surface of what looked like an uninhabited planet. Todd had been so preoccupied by his task that he hadn’t noticed that the ship had auto-landed at their destination.

        “Um, Todd…where _are_ we.” Dirk asked, not quite sounding angry—Todd wasn’t quite sure he was even capable of real anger, even after Todd had hit him over the head with a piece of shipping equipment—but definitely being his own version of upset. Which was, to say, not nearly as angry as the normal person might get in his same situation.

        Todd’s gaze shot towards his shoes. “I, uh, had to make one stop before we went to Leviathan.” Dirk’s eyes burned holes into the top of Todd’s head as he spoke.

“That. Wasn’t the deal.” He sounded almost confused, as if wondering why his new friend would lie to him.

        “I’m sorry, okay? You arrived at a kind of inconvenient time, _Dirk_.” Todd said, attempting to punctuate the fact that Dirk was not only a guest on his ship, but an intruder. “I had to come visit my little sister. I usually come to bring her medication a couple times a month and I was just about to come when you…arrived.”

        At the mention of a sibling and ‘medication’, the smolder in Dirk’s eyes was extinguished. “Well, I guess that’s okay, then.” He turned to look back out the window as if nothing had happened. “What is this planet, anyway? No offense to your sister but it looks extremely _boring_.” He said the last word like being boring was the worst possible thing to be.

        Todd looked out at the sandy expanses of Tiber. It was very boring-looking, Dirk _was_ right in saying that. That was actually part of why Todd had chosen it as a home for Amanda.

        “It’s, uh, Tiber.” He said absentmindedly, as something on the screen had caught his eye;

        There was a small plume of smoke traveling up the right side of the screen, coming from the direction of Amanda’s trading post. Todd’s brain took a moment to process what he saw, but once he did his heart skipped a beat.

        “Take this!” Todd shouted, shoving the stone into the hands of a very confused Dirk before running frantically out the door of the ship so quickly that he almost forgot to grab his bag and mandoviol.

        _There were no factories in Tiber._ Todd thought hastily as his shoes hit the sand. _There are no fireplaces._

_If there was a fire burning somewhere on Tiber, the only thing it could mean was trouble._

 

~~~

LOCATION: B-15

        There were three forms standing on a lone asteroid. Two of these were human people who could only be described as “shadowy”, both because they gave off an aura of general sketchiness and because they were quite literally standing in shadow. The third shape was the thing that was casting all this shadow, a giant thirty foot spire that started out six feet across and tapered up into the void of space.

        But then again, this was all just appearances, and appearances are often wrong. In this case, however, if a bystander were to see these men standing alone on this asteroid and were to judge them as being evil, or at least sketchy, they would be correct.

        The taller of the two human figures took a step towards the spire, the dusty ground of the asteroid creaking like an old hardwood floor beneath his foot. The man didn’t take any notice of this very strange sound, and if he did he didn’t show it.

        He stared up at the spire as if surveying its every nook and cranny, despite it being very nondescript and extremely boring to look at. He saw it as if he was looking at it for the first time, which he was.

        “It sure is…big.” He muttered.

        The shorter man squinted up at his companion, trapped between wondering if he was joking and not wanting to question his superior.

        “It definitely is.”

        “I didn’t know they were going to be so big. Were they supposed to end up this size?”

        The shorter man was becoming more and more confused by his companion’s apparent cluelessness. “Uh…yes? The blueprints were extremely specific.”

        “Blueprints?”

        For the shorter man the experience was becoming more surreal by the second. “…yes? The ones that—they got sent to your office, right? You saw them?”

        “Oh, yeah, right. Y’know, I get a lot of paper work on a day-to-day basis, it’s so hard to keep up with and they always use such big words…” He turned to grin at his subordinate. “I trust you guys have it under control though, right?”

        The other man struggled not to grimace in return. “Right.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave any comments/ideas/theories. Hopefully The next chapter will be up in a week, but I need some reinforcement to make that happen!


	8. Threat

LOCATION: Unknown. worrying.

Once Farah moved on from trying to escape, she instead decided to become acquainted with her surroundings.

Granted, though, there wasn’t much to get acquainted with. From the looks of it she was in nothing but a metal box, the size of the average bathroom. Despite the nondescript-ness of it, however, Farah couldn’t help but feel like she’d been there before.

This was impossible, of course; she was definitely somewhere on a secret empire base, lightyears away from Leviathan or any other place she’d been in her lifetime, which was a short one at that next to the comparative age and size of the universe. She’d only gotten to see so much of the universe already, and now she was going to die in a little metal box alone with only her deja-vu to as company.

She was no longer trying to gauge how long she’d been there, only that she’d been there long enough to assume that she wasn’t coming out anytime soon, and would probably be left there until her time ran out altogether.

Because, if they were planning on taking her out, wouldn’t they have done so already? She had so much important resistance information packed inside her alien brain just waiting to be tortured out (not that Farah was the kind of person to succumb to torture, but her captors didn’t yet know that). She felt almost indignant at the fact they hadn’t even attempted to get to know her a little yet. 

The only other explanation would be that her captors didn’t yet know what they were going to with her, but she didn’t dare entertain that option. The empire always had a plan.

~~~

LOCATION: increasingly near to the planet of Leviathan

 

Even racing at Leviathan with breakneck speed, it would be hours before they would actually reach the surface of the planet. This was an aspect of space travel that Ken could only imagine was hard for Bart to get accustomed to. They clearly liked to live their life from one victim to the next, and it’s kind of hard to do that when the amount of time between even seeing another human being could be days at a time.

Ken could see Bart beginning to become jumpy already, fidgeting in their seat, unable to stay still for even a minute.

Ken had to admit, he was getting pretty bored as well. And with this boredom came the slow and creeping realization of how hungry he was. It’d been hours—there were no clocks on the ship so he could only estimate—since he’d eaten, and that realization was beginning to get to him.

He wasn’t really interested in striking up a conversation with Bart in order to ask if there was any food on board. Be it because of the irritability that came with his combination of hunger and tiredness (he hadn’t slept since his minutes-long nap on the motherboard back on B-17), or the fact that maintaining a normal conversation with them for any amount of time was a near impossible feat. It seemed he didn’t need to try, however; his stomach spoke for him, breaking the silence between them with an animalistic growl.

“What was that?” Asked Bart, suddenly grinning as if Ken’s stomach had told an incredibly good joke.

“I’m. hungry.” Ken replied, trying to bite back the hostility in his voice. He wondered for the first time how Bart had managed to go so long without eating, although he had already began to suspect that they weren’t entirely 100% human.

“Oh, yeah. Guess I forgot.” They replied, somehow making Ken’s level of irritation double.

They got up and opened the sliding door that led out of the bridge, making Ken realize that the door hadn’t been locked and he probably could’ve left to explore the rest of the ship at any time. He sat still on the floor for a moment, fuming, before getting up to follow Bart.

They walked through a long, echo-y, windowless hallway, their footsteps clanging off the expansive metal grating lining the floor. Ken wouldn’t have been surprised if there wasn’t a single window in the whole ship outside of the bridge, considering the type of vessel it was—a big, lumbering metal behemoth built for shuttling around thousands of tons of cargo. Ken could only imagine the giant rooms sitting behind each door they passed by, and he didn’t dare wonder how Bart had gotten their hands on a ship like this.

They finally reached a door that was totally nondescript, so nondescript in fact that Ken had no idea how Bart could possibly tell it apart from the hundreds of other doors in the hallway.

They pushed it open to reveal a room full of dilapidated brown boxes and, in the corner, a small refrigerator that was as covered in rust as its owner was covered in dirt.

Bart wandered over to it, but rather than opening it they instead leaned on the thing and turned to Ken, as if trying to sell him a particularly broken-down car. They grinned.

“Whaddya think?” They inquired proudly. “I stole it from a convenience store a coupla years ago.”

“And how’d you do that?” He asked, wandering cautiously over to the fridge.

Bart absentmindedly picked dirt out of their hair. “Killed those guys, of course.” They smiled fondly at the memory.

Ken crouched by the door of the fridge, hunting through the dented cans and moldy bread. A shiver travelled up his spine, and it wasn’t from the refrigerator.

“How…how can you _do_ that? Killing people, you not that’s not like, OK, right?”

Bart’s light expression didn’t change, but their tone of voice turned serious. “Ken, I don’t gotta worry about that kind of thing. I kill who I wanna, and by extension I kill who the universe wants me to. Meaning, they’re the same. In turn the universe protects me.” They shrugged. “If the universe is anything to depend on, then those convenience store owners probably had it comin’ to ‘em.”

Ken wanted to believe that Bart was lying, or that they were totally insane, but something about their tone kept him from fully thinking so. He couldn’t tell what part of him it was that made him _want_ to believe them; maybe it was how self-assured they seemed to be, or maybe he had actually started to warm up to the serial murderer. Whatever it was, though, it definitely wasn’t his favorite part of himself at the moment.

Once Ken had finally picked through enough of the fridge’s contents to make a semi-acceptable meal, the two wandered back to the bridge.

Back in his place on the floor of the bridge, Ken picked through his haul of the least unappetizing cans he could find, opening them one by one and hazarding a sniff at a couple, evaluating each to see which would make him the least sick.

After eating just enough that he was no longer starving, Ken began to regretfully think of sleep. With all the adrenaline and fear and hunger that had been taking up all the space in his brain for the past hours, pulling him in all different directions and dictating pretty much his every mood, his tiredness hadn’t been given a say.

Besides the minutes-long nap he’d had back on B-17, Ken could only vaguely remember the last time he’d slept. He’d spent so much time lately being overworked and pulling all-nighters and spending his nights in the backs of transpo vehicles that his sleep schedule all out of whack.

The more the minutes slid by the more enticing the prospect of sleep became. He at least knew now that Bart probably wouldn’t kill him in his sleep, and he was so tired that falling asleep on the cold, hard floor of the ship wouldn’t be a problem.

Ken’s thoughts were preoccupied with how _nice_ a nap would be right about now as he drifted off. The last thing he saw as he closed his eyes was Bart’s confused expression staring down at him from the pilot’s seat.

~~~

LOCATION: In full view of Leviathan airspace patrollers

 

“Uh, Ken.” Said Bart. They said this multiple times before Ken’s eyes cracked open, eventually resorting to shaking his inert body.

Ken awoke to Bart kneeling beside him, once again taking a position that reminded him strangely of a young child.

“Wh…what is it…” He groaned, wiping spit from his mouth and grasping at the hope that he might be able to go back to sleep after hearing whatever Bart’s newest problem was.

“I think we’re in trouble. Not like it’s nothin’ I can’t handle, but I thought you should be awake for it.”

With that Ken bolted upright and finally heard the very loud siren—interrupted with the occasional loud “YOU ARE ENTERING LEVIATHAN AIRSPACE, PREPARE YOUR SHIP FOR POLICE INSPECTION”—that was coming out of every speaker in the bridge, and which he had apparently been sleeping too deeply to notice.

“ _ What  _ is that godawful noise?” Bart asked, clapping their hands over their ears.

“It’s a police transmission. They send it to whatever ship their chasing so that they know they’re coming.”

“How do  _ you  _ know that?” Bart asked. Ken pretended not to hear them over the alarm.

The ship came out of near-warp and screeched to a stop—held in place by stabilizing beams strong enough to hold even the biggest of shipping vessels—throwing Ken to the ground but somehow leaving Bart rooted to the spot.

Ken scrambled to stand and placed himself next to Bart by the door to the bridge, which the police would most likely be coming through at any moment after docking with their ship. He smiled and straightened his back, and even considered putting his hand around Bart’s waist on the measly chance he could convince the cops they were a happy couple that was simply there to sightsee, except he’d already decided that he didn’t want to die that day.

“So here’s what I think we should do–” Ken stuttered to a Bart who was worryingly ambivalent to what he was saying. He didn’t get to finish what he was saying, though; or even get his and his companion’s stories straight, because the next thing he knew three men in riot gear came bursting in through the door.

Ken took a step back, shaking hands already in the air, while Bart stood their ground.

“Hello sir, ma’am. Is this your ship?” asked the loudest and most imposing of the three men. He also, coincidentally, had the biggest blaster gun. The only way to more obviously say that this guy was not to be fucked with would be a big blinking sign saying; “THIS IS THE BIG BAD RIGHT HERE.”

“It’s, uh, Bart’s ship.” Ken sputtered. Which was technically the truth, assuming that once you kill someone all their possessions become your own. Ken pointed at his companion eager to draw the attention off of him as soon as possible. Lucky for him, Bart tended to draw  _ a lot _ of attention.

The man, still retaining a warm tone—which was hard for him considering he was talking to them through a helmet with half an inch of tinted glass on the front—turned to Bart; “Well then, young lady, where’d you get a ship like this?” Ken looked to Bart for a reaction to what the man had said, but they couldn’t have been more uncharacteristically stoic.

Bart wouldn’t have gotten a chance to reply even if they’d wanted to, however, because something else had caught the officer’s eye. He pointed down at Bart’s clothes, which were spattered with various substances so ingrained in the fabric that they were practically part of it, a fashion statement in themselves.

“Is that…blood?” He asked, his earnest tone turning sour. Bart still didn’t reply, instead beginning to reach into the shapeless pocket of their jumper where Ken remembered seeing them put their blaster gun back on B-17.

Before Ken knew it there was the sound of three different guns being cocked, along with the largest man yelling ‘STOP RIGHT THERE!’

But Bart persisted, continuing to pull the blaster gun out of their pocket. Ken dove behind the captain’s chair, glancing behind him just in time to see the two parties fire on each other.

Ken went into the fetal position on the floor, forcing his eyes closed. He listened as blaster gun fire boomed someplace outside of his dark little world.

When the firing finally stopped, Ken hazarded to lift up his head for a peak at the rest of the room, expecting to see four dead bodies lying on the floor. Instead he only saw three, with a haunting silhouette looming over them.

Bart grinned down at Ken. Their face and clothes were spattered with twice the blood as before, but none of it seemed to be their own. They were totally unscathed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave any comments/ideas/theories. Hopefully The next chapter will be up in a week, but I need some reinforcement to make that happen!


	9. Assholes

LOCATION: Tiber

Todd had always thought that if he were in a truly perilous situation, adrenaline would carry him through the experience; but as he ran towards the pinpoint on the horizon that was the town in which his sister lived, his heart feeling like it was about to mutiny, he realized that that was not in fact the case. He was running out of steam pretty quickly, and against his will he suddenly collapsed on the ground, a bright yellow form looming over him.

It took him a second to realize that it wasn’t, in fact, one of Tiber’s three suns, but Dirk’s bright yellow cape that was blocking his vision.

“Well that didn’t last as long as I thought it would.” Dirk said, not exactly talking to Todd but also not _not_ talking to him. Todd struggled to lift his head to see that he was only a couple yards from where he’d started. He groaned, already beginning to feel the unbelievable heat of Tiber cooking him from the outside in.

“C’mon, get up.” Dirk said encouragingly, extending his hand toward Todd.

Todd hesitantly grasped it and was pulled into a standing position. He turned with Dirk to look at the plume of smoke coming from Amanda’s town.

“What do you think it _is_?” Dirk asked of a Todd who had already begun to walk—but not run—determinedly towards it.

“I don’t know, but it’s bad.” Todd grumbled. His emotions were a real mixed bag at the moment, if such a bag were to be full of an exponential amount of anger. Anger that was the only thing keeping him from dwelling too much on the situation, and not to mention from crying.

“So, your sister, does she know what you do?” Dirk was just trying to make small talk, not realizing he was poking at a particularly sensitive wound.

“No.” Todd growled. “She thinks I have job playing music at bars.” His tone asserted that any conversation about this topic was now over.

Dirk didn’t say anything else for the rest of the walk, finally catching on to his companion’s anger as quickly as he caught on to all other social cues, which is to say about half as quickly as the normal person.

It took them around twenty minutes to finally get all the way to the town, which was lovingly titled Tiber-12–-being the twelfth out of fifteen similar settlements on the dry, lonely planet.

Todd staggered through the streets to find each building to be ravaged in one way or another. He couldn’t see any people and could only hear the rustle of sand and the howling of wind through open windows.

“Gosh, it’s a ghost town…” Dirk spoke for the first time in twenty five minutes. Todd didn’t respond, instead gathering up clumps of his hair in his fist and tugging at it stressfully. The only sound in the whole town was the roaring coming from a couple lingering fires. There were no bodies, however, and no blood

Todd began to jog again, abandoning a confused Dirk to head in the direction of the town hall, a big black building on the edge of town.

Todd’s heart jumped when he saw lights coming from the inside of the hall, excited to see that they were the white lights of electricity rather than the angry red light of raging fires. He slowed down, climbing the stairs and pushing open the door.

There were a hundred or more people packed into the front room of the town hall, some standing, some huddled in blankets, some milling around the room aimlessly as if they would rather be literally anywhere but her.

An out-of-breath middle aged woman with rosy cheeks jogged up to Todd, smiling tenderly at him and placing her warm hands on his chest. Despite Todd’s already short stature she was forced to look up to speak to him directly.

“Oh, hon, were you lost? We’re gathering in the town hall after the attack, don’t you remember the drills?” When she smiled her face, lined from years of desert air, scrunched up adorably.

Todd brushed her off. “Uh, no. I’m not from here. I–”

All of a sudden Dirk came bursting in, accidentally pushing the door into Todd’s back and knocking the air out of him. Dirk didn’t—or at least he pretended not to—notice, and stationed himself next to Todd as if it was his job to stand there.

_Why couldn’t you have just stayed on the ship?_ Todd thought darkly, as if his thoughts would be magically transmitted to Dirk somehow.

Todd sighed and continued; “ _We_ are here looking for my sister. She lives in the ranch house on the outskirts of town?” He gazed distractedly around the room, scanning for the dark hair and pale skin they both shared.

Dirk grinned at the woman, the two of them seemingly in a battle to see who could be the most aggressively delightful. “Is everyone in town here? It looks like a ghost town outside, we thought there’d been a massacre or something.”

A grimace flashed on the woman’s face for a moment before she went back to matching Dirk’s cheerful expression.

“Yes, mostly. There’re a couple of people in the infirmary down the hall getting treated for some superficial burns. We get gang raids like this all the time, everyone knows exactly what to do.” She turned to Todd. “As for you, young man, I know exactly who you mean. But y’see, she lives right on the edge of town and doesn’t usually partake in our drills…”

As the woman was talking a tall, burly, purple-skinned man with a formidable moustache made of blue and white tentacles had wandered up behind her. He looked like the kind of guy who had a reputation, and his surly expression didn’t exactly do anything to dispute that.

“Ya talking about ghost girl?” He drawled. “Never really got a good feeling about that one. If ya get close enough to the house sometimes ya can hear her screamin fer some godawful reason. Some uh the kids in town think that house is haunted, but by the way she looks when she does come outside, all pale and shit, I honestly don’t blame em”

He looked in the direction that Todd assumed the house was in, despite there only being a wall there at the moment. “Wonder if she survived the attack.” He snorted loudly as if he was about to hock a glob of spit at their feet. “Wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t.”

The woman’s smile had turned thin and hard, her expression sending a message of urgency that the man was absolutely not getting.

When he was finally finished the woman folded her hands together agross her stomach. “Well then. As I said I don’t really know how she’s doing at the moment, but I encourage you to go and check!”

Todd stayed pointedly silent.

Dirk smiled at the woman again, his expression just as bright as always. “A gang raid, you say? What kind of gang?” he asked, using the same tone with which you might asked them what kind of flowers were in their garden, if you were the kind of person who was really intrested flowers.

“Not one we’d ever seen before, there were just a couple guys, I don’t know how many. Called themselves the Rowdy Three, or at least that’s what they kept yelling.”

Suddenly Dirk froze up unexpectedly like a computer into which too much information had been fed.

Todd attempted a smile at the woman but instead only managed a slight grimace.

“We should be going, but thank you for the information.” He gripped Dirk’s stiff shoulders and steered him towards the door and back outside onto the road.

“What was _that_?” Todd whispered urgently despite there not being anyone around to hear them at the moment; “Have you heard of them—the Rowdy Three—before?”

Dirk shook himself out of his reverie. He was emphatically resisting eye contact; “No.” He said, wholly unconvincingly. He then smiled waveringly down at Todd; “We should go looking for your sister.”

At the mention of Amanda, the anger pent up in Todd’s tiny body reawakened. He balled up his fists and began to stomp towards his sister’s house, causing small puffs of dirt to appear in his wake.

“That _asshole_ had _no right_ to talk about Amanda that way.” He grumbled. “She _can’t_ leave the house because of her _asshole_ disability. This whole town is filled with…just… _assholes._ ”

By now the small house that Dirk could only assume was Amanda’s—and was the only house in the whole town that was made of wood—was getting closer and closer, close enough in fact that Dirk could tell that there wasn’t a single light on inside.

“So what  _ is  _ your disability?” Dirk inquired in yet another feeble attempt at small talk.

“Pararibulitis. Gives her visions, like, hallucinations and stuff. And it fucks with her body temperature and stuff.”

When they finally reached the house Todd stood hesitantly in front of the door, clearly agonizing over what the man had said back at the town hall and wracked with worry over what he might find when he opened the door.

Dirk, tired of waiting and not in tune enough to other’s emotions to be willing to overcome his boredom, pushed the door open without giving Todd his moment of introspection.

Todd immediately snapped back to attention, beginning to call out his sister’s name.

The cottage was homey; despite the heat of the desert outside it was very warm, with insulated walls and a small furnace puttering away in the corner.  

There were only three rooms–a bedroom, a bathroom, and a combination kitchen and living room. Dirk watched as Todd rushed from each room to the next; it didn’t take long for them to establish that wherever his sister was, it wasn’t here.

Todd ran throughout the house, touching the different parts of his sister’s life as if they might magically give him some information about where his sister was through osmosis.

“I...don’t think she’s here, Todd.” Dirk said quietly, as if Todd hadn’t yet been able to glean that fact in the past several minutes.

Todd’s breathing was heavy, almost as if he was on the verge of an anxiety attack. He was gripping the front of his shirt like his heart had just gained sentience and was fixing to jump out of his chest.

“This...this isn’t right” *pant* “This _ can’t _ be right. I  should’ve called her, I gave her that phone for a  _ reason _ … We should go back to the ship, yeah, she probably still has her phone on her, she’ll answer…”

Dirk’s short attention span had already found something else to focus on, however; he was staring out of the doorway and out into the desert.

“Uh, Todd. We have company.” He pointed meekly out the door, and the two men watched as a pair of police ships touched down in front of the house. Sweat beaded on Dirk’s brow as the warm stone clenched in his palsied fist let out a soft glow.

 

~~~

LOCATION-The vessel belonging to the gang “the Rowdy Three.”

While she was in no way the biggest fan of her four kidnappers, Amanda’s experience on their ship had improved, if only slightly, since being pushed roughly deeper into the the room. Those first couple moments were a blur; she was shoved down into her chair with a light shining into her face like she was being interrogated, just before having yet another blanket draped over her. At the same time she thought she heard someone grunt “stay warm”, although she couldn’t tell who said it and it was so garbled it could’ve meant any number of things.

After her eyes adjusted, however, Amanda realized that the light shining in her eyes was in no way malicious, and was in fact simply coming from the fluorescent lights scattered on the ceiling.

I say “scattered” because they seemed to be attached in a rather haphazard pattern. The entire room shared the same chaotic vibe, same as the sleeping quarters.

The place may have at one point been the break room of the vessel, but it’s current owners had turned it into a kind of recreation room– if you could even call it that. There were a couple mangled chairs and couches dispersed around the room, as well as bunch of different kinds of weapons–blaster guns, bats, crowbars, and a couple metal cylinders that Amanda didn’t recognize but she thought looked vaguely weapon-like–it was enough to arm a very inexperienced militia. The only electronics in the room were a pair of gigantic amps in the corner that weren’t hooked up to anything at the moment.

Standing around her were four men, all of them extremely menacing-looking, although Amanda’s judgement may have been a bit skewed considering that they’d just kidnapped her. They had all adopted eerily nonchalant positions considering the situation. Every once in a while two or more of them would glance at each other, as if holding some private conversation with their eyes.

One of them, the one closest to her with the dark skin and the hat pulled over his eyes, spoke first–or rather he grunted; “you okay.”

Amanda didn’t register this as a question at first, and so it took her a moment to answer.

“Oh! Uh, yeah. I’m...warm actually.” This was true; Amanda was warmer than she’d felt in years.

“Good!” blurted the smallest of the four. “I-I mean, you were cold, when we found you. So,  _ so  _ cold.” He continued empathetically, as if just being around her had made him feel cold, too. He rubbed his arms as if to punctuate this.

Amanda’s confusion deepened by the second. She squinted up at one of them, who looked to be the oldest, parts of his beard and hair had gone white–although that could’ve just been an odd fashion choice.  
“Where am I? Why did you take me?”

He grunted, and stood as if preparing to speak. 

“BEcause–” blurted one of the others, who Amanda noticed had a black circle drawn around one of his eyes. The older one shot him a look sending a message that Amanda could decipher: ‘shut up’.

“Because we took an interest in you, girl. We think you have something special about you, not that different from what we got. Plus, we like the color blue.”

Amanda didn’t have time to decipher the last part of his statement; she was too busy being angry (this, coincidentally, was the exact same emotion her brother was feeling back on Tiber, multiple light years away).

“But you  _ took  _ me away from my  _ home _ . You realize that, right?”

“Yes, of course, and we’re sorry about that. We weren’t thinking straight.”

“We never do” exclaimed circle-eye. White-hair waved him down.

“We can’t exactly take you back home right now, blue girl, but you have my word that if you feel we’ve treated you wrong once in the coming days, we’ll drop you right back on your little desert planet, no harm done.” 

“You didn’t even like it there, anyway.” yelped the youngest one, his voice high almost to the point of being shrill–it reminded Amanda of the sound one of her brother’s mandoviol strings would make right before it was ready to break.

“But that’s…” She was about to say ‘too easy’, but that didn’t sound right “that’s  _ weird _ . And, and, why do you keep calling me that? ‘Blue girl’, what does that even mean?”

“Your energy, girl, it’s blue! Ain’t you noticed?” exclaimed the one wearing the beanie. The others nodded in agreement.

Amanda was about to further dispute this proposal before she was distracted by a sound so loud it shook the ship–or rather, a shaking so forceful it caused a sound. Despite never having been on a vessel like this before, Amanda was smart enough to infer what had happened–they’d touched down.

 

~~~

Gladren was having, what some would call, a rather unfortunate day. 

It was his first day on the job patrolling the airspace above the part of Leviathan that the biggest resistance base in this arm of the galaxy was stationed in–needless to say, it was an extremely important job.

Up until this time poor little Gladren had simply been doing desk work for the part of the base that acted as a faux police force, filing paperwork and filling out forms for men and women much stronger and bolder than him.

He wasn’t much for action–it was a wonder, in fact, that he had managed to get into the resistance at all–if it had been up to him and not his over-controlling family, Gladren would be working a desk at an accounting agency or somewhere similarly associated with safety. 

Gladren was lucky, then, that when he was assigned to airspace patrol he was given coworkers who understood his preoccupation with safety, and had left him to do the extremely safe job of operating the stasis unit they used to control passing ships they wanted to search.

Gladren was extremely delighted by this turn of events, up until the point he heard a series of pinging gunshots before his partner’s walkie talkies went dark. Gladren was inexperienced, but he wasn’t stupid; he knew those men weren’t going to be home for dinner. 

This left him alone with a singularly difficult decision: the ship on which his partners had met their end was, of course, still in the control of his stasis unit.

The decision was this: he could play hero and use the stasis unit to drag the opposing ship back onto Leviathan and let their fates be decided by his superiors, or he could quietly let them go and let their fates be decided by the will of the universe instead.

Gladren sighed beleaguered as he slowly began to maneuver the other ship back towards Leviathan.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave any comments/ideas/theories. Hopefully The next chapter will be up in a week, but I need some reinforcement to make that happen!


	10. Catch

LOCATION: a police transport vehicle, space

Todd’s thoughts were moving at an absolutely glacial speed. Physically he was sitting on an uncomfortable metal bench in the back of a police cruiser, but mentally he was still standing on the dusty surface of Tiber, his shoes slowly filling with grit.

Amanda  _ hadn’t been there _ . No only that; but there hadn’t even been a sign of a struggle. If Amanda  _ had  _ been captured by the gang that called themselves ‘The Rowdy 3”–however illogical that theory may have seemed, it was still somehow the most plausible–then she’d either left willingly through the front door, or they’d caught her in the middle of an attack, when she wouldn’t’ve been able to fight back, and taken her when she was incapacitated. It didn’t take a whole lot of brainpower for Todd to figure out that the more terrifying option was also by far the most plausible. 

And now Todd didn’t even have a phone to call her with, on the off chance she still had hers, wherever it was; his only one was back on Tiber, along with all his other possessions (save the ones the police had confiscated from him before his arrest).

Dirks body language, however, couldn’t have been more different from Todd’s clenched fists and tense shoulders. He was relaxed, almost smiling, and was swinging his legs over the side of the bench like a small child in the waiting room at the pediatrician’s.

“ _ How  _ can you be so calm?” Todd growled through clenched teeth.

“It’s all meant to happen, Todd. Promise.”

Todd sat on his hands to prevent himself from beating Dirk, if for no other reason than to keep them from getting them in even worse trouble. 

“My  _ sister  _ has been  _ kidnapped,  _ Dirk.”

Dirk looked regretful, but powered on; “Look, Todd, it’s like what I told you about the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.”

At this point Todd barely remembered that conversation at all; it seemed to have occurred years before in an entirely different, sepia-toned memory that hadn’t even happened to him but instead some other, happier Todd in a different universe. Still, he let him continue for no other reason than to have some white noise to distract him from the sound of his own heartbeat.

“What about it?”

“This is part of that. Not your sister getting kidnapped, of course.” Dirk was beginning to stumble over his words; losing his composure as soon as he saw he was losing his audience.

“So, this shit is meant to happen? I’m meant to sit in this shitty police transpo on the way to who-knows-what the fuck kind of fate, contemplating my sister’s disappearance?” The malice was becoming increasingly apparent in his voice, like a knife inching closer and closer to his companion's neck. Despite this, Dirk continued;

“Not exactly. I mean it in a broader sense; we’re meant to know each other, we’re meant to get captured, eck setra.”

“You mean et cetera.”

“Whatever. My point is, I thought this was just another one of the cases of unfortunate circumstances that seem to make up my life, but it’s more than that; we’re  _ meant  _ to meet each other. It’s fate–like that Fork thing you were talking about.” Todd didn’t bother to correct him that time, at this point his attention had wandered back to Tiber, reviewing what little evidence he’d been able to gather before being arrested.

Suddenly Dirk’s face lit up. He had clearly remembered something important, and that fact did nothing but strike dread into Todd’s heart. 

“That reminds me!” Dirk began to fumble with the pockets of his suit, and it was then that Todd realized he had somehow slipped out of his handcuffs, which were now sitting, still closed, on the bench next to him. 

“How did you-”

Todd’s line of inquiry was cut short, however, when he saw what Dirk was holding in front of him. 

While it had simply been letting out a faint glow back on Tiber, the stone–Todd now remembered their names; Kaiber Crystals–was now glowing profusely, and letting out a warmth that was faint, but strong enough that Todd could feel it hitting his face. The feeling it gave him was more than warmth, however; despite having discovered that his sister was missing less than thirty minutes go, he could feel his racing heart rate beginning to slow and his thoughts becoming more manageable.

“What the...fuck…”

Todd didn’t have much of a chance to react past that, however, because they had just been pulled out of warp and touched down.

 

~~~

 

LOCATION: Leviathan interrogation room

“If you have magic powers or whatever the fuck, why can’t you just get us out of this?”

Bart turned this sentence–which Ken had said to them almost an hour earlier when their ship had been slowly inching towards the surface of Leviathan under the influence of a giant military-grade tractor beam–over in their head.

Their muttered reply had been; “It doesn’t work like that, Ken.” They’d said it playfully, with a slight smile on their face, like they were brother and sister just playing around rather than two borderline strangers about to get arrested together.

This was mostly true; they couldn’t escape the pull of the tractor beam unless they really wanted to, and for some reason beyond her control they didn’t  _ really  _ want to.

As soon as those policemen had stepped foot on their ship they’d gotten that all-too-familiar feeling. That feeling that was always playing at the back of their head like a persistent earworm, but at times would become too strong to resist; that which made them feel like a domino in a long string of similar dominos, falling into each of their actions and knowing that this line of dominos had been set up long before those policemen had gotten their heads exploded.

There was an unexpected variable this time, however; Ken. Bart had never really felt the need to  _ impress  _ anyone before, and yet they kept replaying Ken’s pleading words in their head, recalling the pleading puppy-dog expression he’d made when saying it. And they felt...bad. They felt bad for disappointing Ken, for roping him into this situation. They felt at fault despite knowing that all such mistakes are, in the end, the fault of the universe and the universe only.

Bart knew this was a useless attraction; bad and unnatural for the same reason they’d never understood why people could keep pets. They knew Ken would die, eventually, because there was literally no evidence to the contrary. 

Bart watched the door of the interrogation room like a dog waiting to get fed. That same ever-present feeling–the Fork, Ken had called it, or something like that–told them that they could just walk through without consequence, leaving the police station and Ken behind and consider this only a minor hiccup in the course of their life.

An even stronger feeling, however, told Bart to stay, rather than abandoning the man who was becoming dangerously close to becoming their friend. Some would’ve called that feeling a conscience, but Bart didn’t know the meaning of the word.

Bart barely noticed the sound of someone coming down the hall despite the loud, periodic steps. She only acknowledged the sound when the door opened, signalling the beginning of the interrogation.

~~~

Amanda watched, frozen, as her four kidnappers picked through the wide array of weapons on the floor like a group of posh women window-shopping on a sunday afternoon. 

The oldest–Martin–picked up a hefty crowbar, and the smallest, Vogel, opted for a bright yellow novelty bat. The other two picked up the silver tubes that Amanda was still trying to figure out the use of; they looked way less useful than the odd crowbar or blaster gun.

Amanda noticed that, too; despite the huge array of guns littering the floor, the rowdies seemed partial to close combat weapons, something you could whoop someone with rather than killing them on sight.

After leaving the makeshift rec room, Amanda followed the rowdies through the winding halls of the ship like she was watching an intriguing performance. They four of them seemed aware of this; the hollered and jumped around like they were trying to impress her. Amanda would’ve been lying if she’d said she wasn’t a little flattered.

They stopped again in the bridge of the ship to put on pairs of fingerless gloves and shrug on leather cloaks over their baggy belted clothes. The cloaks, despite being a deep black, made them look more like the gang members they were than the sith lord you might expect them to look like. The cloaks were covered with man-made splatters of paint and hundreds of assorted multicolored patches and buttons. Gripps’ even had sleeves. 

It was here that Amanda finally decided to speak up.

“What are you guys going to… do? Like, are you gonna fuck up this town like you did mine?”

The others in the room were an array of confused expressions, excluding Martin, who was smirking slightly.

“We didn’t do anything to your town, little blue girl.”

“My name’s Amanda.”

“We’re aware. We didn’t do any permanent damage, and we only took what was needed.”– _ like me? _ Amanda thought– “We never hurt anyone who doesn’t deserve it, like cops and shit.”

“Yeah but, how do you know who deserves it or not?” Amanda tried not to let on how appealing this business structure seemed to her. Fucking up the establishment and living as interplanetary outlaws? What wasn’t to love.

“It’s  _ pretty easy  _ to tell.” Cross interjected, his voice breaking in the middle for emphasis. “Just look for the guys in suits” continued Gripps.

Martin, his intentions yet unknown to Amanda, reached under the main console and came back with piece of pipe that Amanda hoped to the gods wasn’t an important component to the inner workings of the ship.

He tossed it to her, and she found it to be light but sturdy. A fitting weapon. 

“Try it out.” He said. 

~~~

The outside was chilly, but Amanda still wasn’t nearly as cold as she was used to. It was then that she remembered that she still wasn’t wearing any shoes, and she reveled in the feeling of her feet touching something other than scratchy wool sheets and socks.

Amanda recognized the street as being one of the winding necks of the city of Hydra; she’d seen it in pictures her brother had sent her from his travels. 

She entertained the idea of running, but the cons greatly outweighed the pros; she’d be trapped on a planet she barely had any knowledge of, and as far as she knew the Rowdy ship was safe, whether she was there voluntarily or not.

“Are we looking for anything in particular?” Amanda yelled. Only Cross heard her; he yelled something that sounded like ‘rocks!’ and made a triangle shape with his hands.The walked cautiously down the street, going totally unnoticed despite their interesting outfits and plentiful weapons.

Amanda knew that Hydra wasn’t that big of a city, as galactic landmarks go: from what she remembered of Todd’s description it was made up of only five big, sprawling streets–or ‘necks’–that twisted out from the center. Despite  _ knowing  _ this, however, Amanda couldn’t help but feel differently; to her, the city was the biggest thing she’d ever seen.

She followed Martin through the streets, with with Gripps and Cross standing on either side and Vogel following behind in an almost protective formation. She tried to focus on their route, or on the ground, or on Martin’s back, and to ignore the increasingly present anxiety and claustrophobia that was slowly filling her every crevice. 

Amanda came within inches of bumping into Martin when they stopped in front of a big, brutalist grey building.

“This is it.” She heard him mumble.

They walked inside, and as soon as the door opened there were guards on them. Amanda was lucky enough to not have to react as immediately as the rowdies did, springing into action and knocking out the guards one by one. 

Now that she was inside Amanda had a better idea of what the building was; it looked like a warehouse or something similar, full of containers and towering shipping vessels. And every part of it, every box and ship and uniform, bore the symbol of the empire. To Amanda that meant nothing was off-limits.

The rowdies had split up, running down the different halls of the warehouse and running their weapons down the shelves. Amanda thought she saw Gripps holding what looked like a sword made of light, but she only got a glimpse of it and wrote it off almost immediately.

Out of the corner of her eye Amanda spotted a guard who was scrambling to punch in a number into a comm set in the wall. She saw her chance and took it, gleefully running up behind the guard and conking him over the head with her pipe. She watched as he crumpled to the ground, leaving the comm buzzing, waiting for a button push that would never come.

In all this commotion Amanda almost didn’t feel the consistent buzzing in her back pocket, but only almost.

She had almost forgotten that the phone was in there, although she didn’t go anywhere without it. Todd had reiterated again and again that she must keep it on her at all times, lest she get in danger or he find it fit to contact her. ‘Todd can be so unbelievably doting sometimes’ was a thought she often found herself having.

She pulled it out of her pocket–it was small and round and smooth like a river rock, and was equipped only to send and receive calls, similar to one you might give to a small child–and was unsurprised to see it was her brother.

“Amanda, holy fuck, Amanda? Is that you? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, it’s me, I’m fine.” She said, already tired of her brother’s patronizing and jittery tone; although she could barely speak up over all the noise the rowdies and the remaining guards were making behind her.

“Really? Okay, good. But, really? Are you sure? Where are you? It’s really loud on your end…” He sounded like he’d just run a marathon for the first time in his life and sorely regretted it. “Look, we went to your house and you weren’t there. Can you tell me where you are so we can come get you?”

“Wait, who’s ‘we’? Where are  _ you _ ?” 

“I’m in a police station, in the middle of Leviathan–”

But Amanda didn’t get to hear the rest of what Todd had to say, because at that point the phone slipped from her hand.

She was frozen in place, staring straight ahead at a faceless imperial guard who had a gun pointed directly at her face. 

From what might’ve looked like shock to an outsider, Amanda crumbled to the ground. She felt that familiar feeling once again, not only of being cold but also of having her lungs squeezed by some invisible force. Her teeth chattered as she gasped for breath, ghosts wailing and flailing around her.

There were multiple pairs of feet standing in front of her, but none of them belonged to the guard, who’d apparently not been willing to shoot a young girl in mostly-cold blood.

Then her vision become blurred with whitish-blue light, and warmth replaced the freezing cold as she slowly lost consciousness.

 

~~~

Amanda’s mouth was glued shut, both literally and figuratively. She didn’t want to talk, but she couldn’t’ve spoken even if she’d want to; she was so thirsty that the lack of water had left her mouth sticky and had made her tongue thick and hard to manage. She didn’t dare ask for something to drink, however, because that would’ve involved talking.

The question that she’d asked a couple minutes earlier was still ringing through the silence.

Amanda had awoken in the same huddle of blankets she’d found herself in a couple hours earlier, except this time the four other beds had been occupied. The rowdies sat there, watching her intently, looking like they’d barely moved in at least thirty minutes. Cross’ leg was bouncing ferociously.

It was then that Amanda asked the question; “What did you do to me?”

Whatever they had done had caused her attacks to stop midway through, and for the cold she’d become so accustomed to disappear.Of course the effects of this phenomena had been only positive so far, but who knew if this would continue.

The rowdies shared that same look, like they were talking without moving their mouths.

“It’s your energy, blue girl.” Martin said finally. “It tastes good to us. And when you have your ‘attacks’ you’re like a buffet. We figure this arrangement is good for both of us, but if you don’t agree we’ll stop.”

“And  _ blue girl _ ? Why do you keep calling me that?”

“Your energy, blue!” Vogel blurted. “Some people are green, sometimes purple, sometimes red, but you’re blue!” He smiled from ear to ear, like he had just given her the biggest possible compliment.

Amanda was having a hard time maintaining her anger. She couldn’t deny that she respected the Rowdies’ lifestyle; that the arrangement they’d outlined  _ was  _ mutually beneficial, and she did like not constantly being cold. 

Amanda decided to shift the subject; “What were you looking for, anyway, back on Hydra?”

“Kaibers!” Cross yelled without missing a beat. He held his hands into the same diamondlike shape he had back on the street.

“They’re power.” Martin elaborated. “Gripps, show ‘er”

Gripps stood silently and pulled out the silver tube Amanda had seen him with earlier. Up close she could tell that it was covered with different notches and buttons, and it had a grip around the hilt like a knife without the knife part. There was a string hooked around it that attached it to Gripps’ wrist.

“What’s the string for?”

  
“So y’don’t drop it.” With that, he flipped one of the switches on the side

 

Todd had always brushed off the stories of the force their parents would tell them when they were younger; the cynicism that would follow him through his life had been apparent even then.

But Amanda had always held onto that belief; not only did it feel like a tether that held her to the memory of her parents, but it felt nice to know that there was some force out there that was acting beyond her control. Todd had always been all-too-eager to blame every little thing that went wrong in his life on himself and his own shortcomings, but Amanda had always felt that there was something other than will, pulling her towards the certain fate.

While she’d long since forgotten most of what her parents had taught her, Amanda would recognize a lightsaber anywhere.

She remembered catching a glimpse of it back at the warehouse, but now it was sitting in front of her in all its glowing purple glory. She stared at it and saw it for what it was; proof of what she had long suspected. She was ready to giver her life for it, if it meant that she could have this feeling forever.

“I know.”

“What?” 

“The crystals. I know where you can get them.”


	11. interrogation

After cashing in on his one phone call–which featured an entirely unenlightening conversation with Amanda that, if anything, only served to raise more questions– Todd sat alone in the room in which he would soon be interrogated.

_ At least you know she’s safe _ he kept telling himself;  _ At least you know she’s  _ **_alive_ ** .

He wasn’t  _ sure  _ she was safe, though, was he? She hadn’t  _ sounded  _ safe, wherever she was there was a lot of yelling and she  _ had  _ hung up pretty abruptly, before he’d even gotten a chance to finish talking. 

Todd shivered and repeated like a mantra the words  _ she’s safe, she’s alive. _ At least he second part of it was accurate, as far as he knew. 

The door opened, causing Todd’s heart to jump into his throat. Standing at the door was a tall, shiny, and overbearing droid–although part of that impression might have simply been generated by the tense nature of the situation. The worn yellow lettering over where his heart would’ve been read ‘ZiM-12’. He was holding a mug that Todd hoped was for him–He hadn’t eaten or drank anything since arriving on Tiber, and that felt like a lifetime ago. 

The droid didn’t sit, but it did set down the mug on his own side of the table. Todd glanced mournfully at it. Not only was it not for him–there wasn’t even anything in it.

“Sorry for keeping you waiting.” He beeped. Even if his tone hadn’t been totally unconvincing Todd still would’ve known he was lying–he’d been through this song and dance before. He wasn’t sorry at all.

“Look, I–I know I haven’t done anything worthy of arrest.” That was a lie, of course, Todd had done at least three things in the last month that could justify his being arrested, but the odds that this droid didn’t know these things were favorable enough to lie.

“We are aware, Mr. Brotzman, that you haven’t done anything wrong”  _ thank the gods  _ “we would just like to ask you a few questions.”

Todd was content at this response, but only to a small degree. This droid came off like the kind of guy who was ready to believe that anyone was guilty, the kind of cop who almost  _ wanted  _ people to lie to him.

“Do you remember Patrick Spring, or possibly another resistance soldier, purchasing something from you in the past year?”

This question bewildered Todd– which was bad, because he really wanted to be on good terms with this guy at the moment.

“I have thousands of unique customers come to me every year, you can’t expect me to remember one specific customer from months ago? Wait..why do you even want to know?” Todd hated how angry he sounded; he knew from experience that it was best to remain complacent in these sorts of situations, but hunger and being forced to sit in a room alone for an hour had left him bitter. 

“Yes, of, course. Well, they would’ve been purchasing a very strong poison, something that you wouldn’t be able to get in a normal weapons store. It’s some  _ extremely  _ potent,  _ extremely  _ illegal stuff.”  _ So he does know.  _ Todd began to sweat; what had simply been a conversation was now a dangerous minefield.

“Wait,  _ did he die _ ? Did he get  _ poisoned _ ?” Despite all the trouble the resistance had gone through to keep their most valuable general a secret, it was hard not to hear tell of the triumphs of Patrick Spring.

ZiM chose not to answer that particular question, but he could tell that he wasn’t getting anywhere. He did a sigh-like whirr. “Chuba poison?”

Todd lost all predisposition for carefulness. “Oh. Oh! Yes! I do remember that, you could’ve just  _ said  _ Chuba. Yeah, that poison is really rare. I remember it because we only had a very small supply, it’s extremely dangerous to get…”

“Yes? So you remember who bought it?” ZiM was clearly struggling to remain accommodating, he clearly just wanted Todd to get to the point, and Todd couldn’t say he didn’t relish it.

“Yeah, an alien lady I think, but I didn’t recognize her species, though. She had big ears” –here he held his hands by his head as if to demonstrate– “and a frankly impractical latex flight suit. She bought all of it off of me, but her price was too high to say no to.”

Despite his relatively unemotional visage, ZiM’s look of dawning realization was still extremely blatant. “Silver suit? Purple-ish skin?”

“Yeah! Out of all my customers, she was pretty memorable; seemed really nervous, almost sad.”

ZiM stared at the wall behind Todd’s head. “Farah.” He in a tone just loud enough for Todd to hear. 

It was clear now that ZiM knew exactly who he was talking about, and for once Todd felt satisfied that he’d actually managed to help the police for once.

ZiM’s next words were mumbled, almost whispered; “And worms, what do you know about them?”

“What do I know about…  _ what _ ?  _ worms _ ?”

ZiM put his hands behind his back with finality. “Thank you Mr. Brotzman, that was all I needed to know.”

ZiM began to walk back to the door, but he turned back to look back at Todd at the last second.

“And Mr. Brotzman, Don’t think that we don’t know about your work. You know that we could arrest you for at least ten different things right now, but we’ve chosen not to because you’ve given us some valuable information.” Todd stared; he’d known that the droid had been lying earlier but that he was straight-up admitting it came as a surprise to him. “However, your value to us now is literally null, and keep in mind that you are not connected to the death of a very important figure. If we find that you have ill intentions, we will not hesitate.”

“Hesitate to wha–” the door slammed. 

“Hesitate to what?” Todd finished his query meekly to the empty room.

 

~~~

Ken hated the situation he was in, and he took no satisfaction or comfort from the fact that it was unavoidable.

They’d arrived on the surface of Leviathan and been escorted from the ship into a police station with surprisingly little resistance from Bart, even though this was the only time Ken could’ve approved of them resisting.

He had, in fact, begged and pleaded with Bart to do whatever special thing they did to keep the universe’s rules from applying to them, but they’d simply brushed him off and said that ‘it didn’t work that way’.

Now Ken was sitting in an entirely featureless room, in which every surface seemed to be made of a metal engineered to be cold and unfeeling. Ken  _ knew _ it was simply an inanimate substance and yet it’s ambivalence to his situation was almost aggressive. He wished he could feel the same way.

The door to the room began to open and Ken attempted to retain a formal sitting position, back straight and hands folded in the center of the table (his wrists were handcuffed for the second time in as many days).

A sleek, thinly built droid stepped in and stood at the head of the table, seeming to tower over Ken, yet another unfeeling piece of metal in a room full of unfeeling pieces of metal.

“I’m Est-vz” He said–he pronounced it like ‘est-viz’. He sounded calm, in a way that subliminally suggested that Ken should be calm, too. Ken, however, had other ideas.

“Look, man, I don’t even know what you’re holding me for. I have  _ no clue  _ what’s going on, and I–I swear I haven’t done anything wrong.” That was a lie, but in the event Est-vz asked him about his profession he could always feign innocence about his empiric employers.

But god, he hated lying.

“Well, here’s the thing; we found you, in the ship of an infamous murder, eating their food and socializing with them, all while your business associate lay dead light-years away. So, excuse us if we’re a bit skeptical.”

Ken couldn’t help but give Bart props for reaching the status of apparent infamy.

“I didn’t  _ know  _ they were a murderer, and they–  _ they kidnapped me _ !”

“You didn’t  _ know  _ they were a murderer? Even when they  _ killed  _ your  _ boss _ ?” Ken didn’t know how the droid was putting so much urgency in his voice, but it was definitely effective.

Ken gulped. Cops made him nervous, and droids doubly so. He was so well acquainted with the inner workings of machines that being around a droid was like talking to someone while imagining their every organ and muscle moving and pulsing under their skin. 

“I mean, obviously yes, but...I didn’t really have a choice. She did  _ threaten  _ me.” Ken was resentful of the fact that Est-vz was making  _ him  _ feel inadequate, a man who’d less than 48 hours earlier been kidnapped by a homicidal maniac.

“But you did kind of have a choice– assuming what you’re telling me is true– we searched your ship, all the doors were open, and the escape pods were fully functional. You could’ve left at any time.” 

Ken gritted his teeth, not bothering to correct him in that it wasn’t  _ his  _ ship at all. 

“Yes, but I didn’t  _ know  _ that.”

The droid waved him off. “That’s besides the point either way. We cannot yet prove that you were an accomplice to Mx. Bartine.

_ Bartine. Is that really what Bart is short for?  _ Ken thought, almost laughing upon hearing it. That sounded even weirder and un-namelike than Bart.

“So, what?”

“So, we are about to interview them now, after which point we’ll evaluate your guiltiness, and your usefulness to us.” Ken swallowed hard. That sounded suspiciously like something you would say to someone who is beginning to look increasingly guilty. 

With that, the droid slipped out the door. 

“He didn’t even say goodbye” Ken mumbled, to no one in particular.

 

~~~

Dirk sat quietly in the waiting room, sipping the borderline flavorless tea he’d gotten from a machine in the corner (as far as he knew the machine wasn’t made to make tea, but he’d punched ‘tea’ in the keypad anyway and drank whatever came out). 

He huddled under the shock blanket that the cops had generously gifted him once they’d figured out that he had no use to them and wondered how Todd was faring.   
  


~~~

Bart was so mesmerized by the two metal men that they could barely focus on the questions. They’d never seen anything like them before; they’d seen human beings in metal suits before, but never this.

The questions didn’t matter anyway– the questions people asked them were always the same. ‘Where’d that blood come from,’ ‘whose ship is that,’ ‘where’d you’d get that gun,’ ‘ah, ah, will you please put the gun down,’. Bart’s mumbled replies were always the same, too.

One of droid was taller, sleeker, newer. Bart detected an accent in his voice but they’d never been any good at identifying that kind of thing.

The other one was smaller, older, but just as shiny. He seemed to be the one in charge. He was always leaning forward and extending hands towards Bart in a show of affability, and calling Bart by their full name– a name they hadn’t heard in a long while. He was trying to be  _ nice  _ to them, because he was  _ scared  _ of them. 

Bart smiled. They were just about to give another unsubstantial, pointless answer to another unsubstantial, pointless question when they heard the doors of the police station crash open.

The universe was breaking them out.

 

~~~

LOCATION: unknown, several days earlier.

 

The taller man and the shorter man both had their worries about kidnapping a little girl. Both of their worries were justified, although neither of them could be considered moral because of them, since none of their doubts were for moral reasons. 

The shorter man (who was called Riggins by his coworkers, and by everyone, since he didn’t have anyone other than coworkers in his life) was doubting the endeavor they were embarking on because he worried he was building a track record for kidnapping children. Years before he’d launched on a similar project– one which involved taking children from their parents– that, while justified, had had a similar pitch.  To be frank, he was simply worried that he was becoming too predictable.

The taller man– who was referred to as Friedkin by his subordinates, which was what the shorter man was to him– had much more to-the point fears. He was worried their young cargo was making too much noise, and they might get caught hauling a young girl in the trunk of their crawler.

Neither of them were worried about the wellbeing of the girl, because as the saw it, she wasn’t the one about to get tortured. She was the tool for the torture. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> every single review/comment/critique is hugely valued!


	12. Release

Amanda couldn’t describe with words the giddiness she felt crashing into the door of that police station. She had, over the course of their trip to Leviathan, totally abandoned all worries about committing crimes and triggering attacks– she was finally having fun for the first time in years.

She first hung back at first and waited as the rowdies rushed forward into the precinct, knocking out every officer that got in their way. She delighted in seeing uniform after uniform fall to the ground. 

The next couple minutes were a blur. Amanda looked wildly around for her brother, but he wasn’t in the offices or the waiting room. She hadn’t yet given much thought to  _ why  _ her brother was in a police station in the biggest city in the quadrant; she hadn’t even considered that he might be there as a suspect, rather than a witness. 

Once she realized he wasn’t in the front of the building, her and the rowdies ventured deeper into the building, where the jail cells and interrogation rooms were housed. They shrieked gleefully as they flagrantly smashed the buttons lining every surface of the guards’ station, one of which apparently opened every computerized door in the building, releasing every single convict and suspect. Amanda had at this point just started yelling out her brother’s name. 

She eventually found him, standing in one of the interrogation rooms. He was talking to a tall, gangling man in a bright yellow cloak– and despite not being able to hear what they were saying the urgency of their words was apparent in their body language.

“Todd!” Amanda rushed into her brother’s arms. He yelped in surprise and then gave her an awkward brother-hug that was half him trying to push her away on the off chance he triggered an attack.

 

~~~

Amanda looked filthy; there were marks and spots all over her, some of which looked like blood. None of it seemed to be hers, though, and she was wearing the biggest smile he’d seen her have in years.

She pulled out of the hug and grinned at him, but Todd was a bit worried that without her arms to support him, he might collapse from shock.

Amanda’s eyes went to Dirk, and she pointed up at him, still smiling.

“Is this who ‘we’ are? I was wondering who you meant when you said that.”

Without hesitation Dirk’s hand shot out and shook Amanda’s vigorously. He was beaming. Todd squeezed his eyes shut, feeling the headache he’d been carefully cultivating for the past fourteen hours start develop a conjoined twin.

“Uh, yeah. This is Dirk. He’s my… well, he’s Dirk.”

“I’m his friend.” Dirk said, as if Todd had simply forgotten to add that part. Todd was already too annoyed to correct him. 

Amanda finished shaking hands and crossed her arms. This movement could have been construed as hostile if she hadn’t still been smiling.

Amanda really wanted to ask him where his ship was so she could get the kaiber crystals, but there was a more pressing question itching at the back of her mind.

“So, Todd, I thought you were stationed on Wyvern for the next month or so, what are you doing at a police station in Leviathan?  And in an interrogation room no less?”

~~~

Todd was clearly scrambling for answers. Dirk’s heart fell as he watched his companion choke on the lie still stuck in his throat.

“They had questions, uh, about your brother’s job.” Dirk said finally.

He immediately felt Todd clench his fists from where their hands were brushing each other. He’d said the wrong thing and they both knew it. 

Amanda’s smile faltered; “They had a question...about...bar music?”

Dirk could tell from his expression that Todd had made an uncharacteristically strong split-second choice.

“I don’t do that, Amanda.”

 

~~

The flush that Amanda had only just recently regained in her cheeks was totally gone.

“A smuggler? Like a  _ criminal _ ?”

Todd had almost forgotten that they were still in a police station in the middle of a raid, criminal and policemen alike running and yelling through the hallway outside. Dirk gave him a stressed-out grimace that said something like; ‘we have to leave,  _ soon _ ’.

Amanda had by this time taken his silence as confirmation. Her grin had been replaced by a different kind of smile; the stressed, faltering smile of someone about to collapse like a deck of cards.

“But why would… You’d never deal with the empire right? At least not that?”

Todd let out an animalistic growl that exposed him as the cornered beast he felt like. He reached out to take his sister’s wrist.

“Look Amanda, I don’t know how you got here, but we need to leave. I can pick up my ship back on Tib– ”

His sister pulled her wrist away from his hand. Her smile had been replaced with a cold, hard line. Her eyes were full of disdain. 

Anger was bubbling under the surface of Todd’s usual mix of stress and depression. 

“Money is  _ money _ , Amanda. Where do you think your medicine comes from? I couldn’t pay for that on a musician’s salar–”

There were tears welling up in Amanda’s eyes now. Usually when she cried Todd would, too, but in the moment his anger was too present for his sadness to push through.

Todd saw four figures appear in the doorway behind her. There were five distinct yells– one of which was Dirk’s– and a flash of pink light. When Todd’s eyes readjusted and he looked in the place Amanda had been standing, she was gone.

~~~

No matter how many times you have all the emotions sucked out of your body, you never get used to the feeling.

It was like when you’re just about to fall asleep and your body decides to suddenly give you the sensation of falling for a half a second, like a rope lowering you ever so slightly closer to your death.

At least, it was  _ like  _ both of those sensations the way holding your finger over a birthday candle is  _ like  _ lighting yourself on fire.

Dirk almost lost all consciousness just from seeing the Rowdy Three, so by the time the familiar burning pink light filled his vision he was near comatose.

He awoke after an amount of time he couldn’t decipher to Todd shaking him awake.

“Dirk, I don’t know what’s going on, but we need to  _ go. _ ”

As he always did after the rowdies sucked him dry, Dirk felt unusually calm. He practically floated through the events of the next couple minutes; watching dreamily as Todd ran into the evidence room to retrieve the backpack the police had taken from him upon his arrival, and a blaster gun that was simply lying around.

Dirk didn’t snap back to reality until they arrived outside the station, where the riot in the police station became muddled with the din of the street until the two became indistinguishable.

Todd was talking– no,  _ yelling _ – at Dirk, and his hand was digging into his arm like a claw. Dirk didn’t understand what Todd could possibly be so worked up about, but he had to admit that the physical contact was nice.

“We have to  _ go _ , Dirk. We have to go find my friend, or...or  _ something _ .” Todd seemed on the verge of hyperventilating, his mind going into overdrive because if he might stop even for a second the veil of urgency would fall and he’d collapse into a pile of despair. 

Todd started pulling Dirk along with the throng of people, and for a moment his eyes were drawn back to the door of the police station. Dirk kept feeling something thump up against him, and he looked down to find a small black ball bumping persistently against his ankle. He smiled at it before being distracted by someone staring at him from across the road.

For what felt like years but was probably only a split second, Dirk’s eyes met another pair a couple meters away. They were just as wild as his, although they were almost entirely obscured by unkempt hair and eyebrows.

They struck fear deep somewhere in Dirk’s gut, and in a moment they were gone.

 

~~~

Bart’s breakout from the police station was much less eventful. Every event seemed to fall perfectly into place, as events often did in the course of Bart’s life.

They walked calmly out of the interrogation room after the two droids had left, the horde of people filling the precinct seeming to almost part in their path. 

In the very first room Bart checked they found Ken huddled in the corner, hands covering his head as if he were expecting the building to fall on top of him. Bart nudged him with their foot and then coerced him back out in the hallway. They pulled him along by his wrist, which flopped around in their grip like an impersistent fish.

They first officer they found lying on the ground had a fully loaded blaster on him, which Bart picked up and stuffed into their waistband. They then made a beeline to the door of the station.

~~~

They didn’t make it out, though, at least not without a roadblock.

Ken heard a yelp from behind them and his already fast-beating heart almost went into arrest when he turned around to find that they were on the other side of an officer’s blaster gun. 

Ken glanced helplessly at Bart, who made no move to take their own blaster gun out of their waistband. They simply grinned at the man on the other side of the gun.

The officer stood, frozen for a moment as if preparing himself mentally to take a human life. He never got a chance to pull the trigger, however, because a bullet from across the room suddenly decided it was destined for the man’s head. The next thing Ken knew, the officer who he’d been sure would be the one to kill him was lying on the ground, dead.

That was the first time in all his life that Ken had seen someone kill a man with a look. He couldn’t keep his eyes off of Bart for the next five minutes. 

 

~~~

Bart caught a pair of blue eyes through the bedlam of the street. They lingered on their own for just long enough for the to know who they were looking at, and what they had to do next.

~~~

The first ship they tried was unlocked, because of course it was. It was simply parked unattended on a roadside docking bay, a sleek high-tech vehicle that couldn’t have been more different from the clunky shipping vessel they’d left back at the police station. While Ken wasn’t thrilled about his current situation, he’d have been lying if he said he didn’t enjoy the luxury.

Ken was faced once again with a similar conundrum to the one he’d had back on  B-17; It would’ve been so easy just to walk away from Bart and their insanity– he wasn’t even handcuffed this time.

Except, if he did stay then he’d once again be left on a planet he barely knew, alone and without any supplies or even any money. He resented Bart for having put him in this situation, but that resentment didn’t do anything to improve the situation. 

Plus, if he left Bart now it would feel like reading two chapters into a good book and then never finishing it. As someone who considered himself generally pretty logical, Ken knew that past events were not a predictor of future results, but he couldn’t help but think that since Bart hadn’t yet killed him, they probably wouldn’t in the future.

All of this information rushed through Ken’s head as he watched Bart venture deeper into the ship he could only assume they were about to steal. It wasn’t until they had entirely disappeared from his view that Ken made his decision. He clenched his fist and walked up the stairs and into the soon-to-be stolen ship.

 

~~~

Bart hadn’t been positive that Ken would follow them. They’d had a sinking feeling that he might, and of course they kind of  _ wanted  _ him too– they hadn’t had someone to talk to so consistently since the doctors and scientists of their childhood– but they weren’t about to stop him from leaving. In the eyes of the universe he’d served his purpose to Bart, and they could just as easily discard them as they’d captured him.

So Bart was a little surprised when they heard footsteps behind them, followed by the quiet swish of a closing door. The spun around to look at Ken before they had a chance to stop themself.

 

~~~

If Ken hadn’t known better he would’ve thought that the expression on Bart’s face was almost akin to surprise.

~~~

Farah was finally being interrogated. She couldn’t say that she felt happy, but she did feel something similar to  _ relief  _ when the two tall, looming men began to question her. It wasn’t fun– not by a long shot– but at least it was a change of pace.

The men were tall, taller than a normal human, and they had large pointed ears similar to her own. They weren’t the same species, however; she could tell from their overly hairy arms and wrinkled brows.  

Most of their questions made little sense to her. They kept talking about worms and bb units and asking her weird things about Captain Spring that implied answers she didn’t want to know. It didn’t help that she’d been trapped in this room for at around two days– her answers were slurred and she had the creeping feeling that her captors were getting impatient.

“She’s sleepy, Zed. Her brain is...addled.”

“That is correct, Fred. Maybe we should...jog her memory.” With that ‘Zed’ pulled out a pair of what Farah regretfully recognized as a pair of electric conductor pads. 

“Good idea, Zed.” Zed pouted as if a little disappointed his companion didn’t appreciate his comedic timing.

They both started inching forward, but Farah cried out, which stopped them in their tracks. 

“Wh-what’s going on? Where’s Patrick? Why haven’t you tried questioning me until now?”

Zed stared at her, blank eyes boring into her skull. “Patrick has been sacrificed to the glory of the worm.” They both paused and faced their palms towards the ceiling for a moment as if in sudden prayer. “Glory to the worm.” They said in terrifying unison. 

Fred then picked up right where his companion left off, like they were both part of the most unnecessarily creepy hivemind. “And we haven’t interrogated you yet because we weren’t sure if you had valuable enough information.”

Zed rubbed the two conductors together hungrily. “And that, we’re about to find out.”

“What the FUCK does any of that mean?” Farah’s vision was becoming increasingly blurred with tears, half from the pain and half from finding out that her boss was dead– and she was yelling now, her voice increasing in volume with every word. 

They had started inching towards her again, the predatory look in their eyes an omen of the pain she would soon be going through.

“Okay but, I just want to let you know those fake names are dumb as FU– ”

Farah kicked towards her captors, but her feet never got the chance to connect because at the very same moment the door behind them flew open, throwing both of them to the ground on either side of her, unconscious. 

Instead her attempted kick flung her forward and, however improbably, into a standing position.

There were now two men standing in the doorway, and while the didn’t seem entirely harmless they very obviously weren’t of the same organization as Fred and Zed. The three of them stared at each other in total, astonished silence, until the taller of the two men broke it;

“That wAS SO COOL.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every comment + kudos is appreciated!


	13. Lucky

There’s nothing quite like seeing your daughter’s mind being transported into the body of a robot. 

Patrick knew he deserved whatever torture these men had in store for him. After years of hubris and vanity and bad decisions, he’d finally come to terms with his punishment.

But Lydia? Lydia didn’t deserve any of that. She was still young, and what’s worse was she didn’t even know  _ why _ any of this was happening.

In the moment when the men who’d brought her there were bickering amongst each other about their methods he leaned forward to stare into his daughter’s eyes, which were brimming with tears.

“Look, Lydia.” He whispered in his smooth baritone “I need you to know that none of this is your fault. Your father has done some very bad things in his life and I am so,  _ so  _ sorry.” Her eyes pleaded for answers, but her mouth was gagged and keeping her from asking any of the questions that went with them. Besides, there wasn’t enough time.

“Look, Lydia, I can’t explain this now, but you  _ will  _ get out of this. Don’t be afraid, and when you do get out I need you to find a man named  _ Dirk Gently. _ ”

Lydia was clearly struggling to understand, but she nodded anyway. 

It was then that the men snapped back to attention, turning back to the two captured parties. One of them pulled a large, clunky metal box out of a bag he was carrying and placed it between Lydia and the deactivated bb unit next to her. 

That was the worst part of it all; knowing that it was his machine, his  _ innovation  _ would be the one to hurt his daughter.

He watched in horror as Lydia was put inside the unit, a flash of electric blue light near blinding him. They took her body out of the room to god knows where. 

When Patrick did eventually break out of his bonds and kill half the men in the room it just didn’t feel quite as satisfying as it could’ve.

~~~

“We need to find my friend, and  _ now _ .”

Todd’s palms had grown cold and clammy during their tromp through the Leviathan city streets. Dirk wasn’t quite sure when Todd had taken his hand, and while it had been a nice and endearing at the start it had begun to become uncomfortable and a little sweaty.

“God, I don’t know where we are at all– ” Todd stopped in his tracks mid sentence, causing Dirk to crash directly into him and almost making both of them fall over in the middle of a busy city street, although Todd didn’t seem to notice any of this.

“Todd, are you– ” Dirk started, but Todd shushed him.

“I recognize this place.” He pointed at one of the many neon signs marking the side of that road. “I’ve been to that bar before, The Orb, which means…” 

They were walking again, but they’d changed direction. Todd yanked Dirk down a nearby alleyway, causing him to make a sound like an animal getting its foot stepped on.

They came out onto another street after squeezing between two buildings. Todd paused for only a moment to look left and right before bolting forward again, almost causing Dirk to drop what was in his arms. Soon they were standing in front of a broken-down three story building, both out of breath but Dirk being the only one willing to show it. 

“Here.” Todd gasped once he was fit to breathe. “My friend– Jyk– used to live at this hotel. Gods I hope he still does.”

Todd’s eyes were wild and it was clear that adrenaline was still running the show. “Gods, that was  _ crazy  _ right? But like  _ really _ cool. Gods, maybe you’re ‘it’s all connected’ bit was right, like, we were just  _ out _ ? And, gods, what did those guys  _ do  _ to you? Are you like, okay?” 

Dirk was about to comment on the fact that for a man who claimed not to be religious he’d just used the same religious epithet four times in thirty seconds when Todd glanced down at what he was holding. 

“Where did you get  _ that _ ?” He was pointing down at the miniature bb unit Dirk was cradling in his arms like a scared animal. Dirk smiled proudly. “I  _ found  _ it.” He said.

“Did you  _ steal  _ that from the  _ police  _ station?” Todd asked incredulously. 

Dirk pouted. “I didn’t  _ steal  _ it. It followed me here. I only picked it up because it was having trouble keeping up with us. I  _ think  _ it might be a  _ clue _ .” He rubbed the top of the bb unit’s body the way you might scratch behind the ear of an animal. “Besides, you stole that blaster from the evidence room, how is this any different?” 

Todd grimaced but decided not to argue. 

They’d finally slowed down to a walk now that they were going into the hotel. Todd walked up to the reception desk and asked the woman standing there if his friend was still living there. She left to go check their computers.

Todd turned to look at Dirk again. “But seriously, who were those guys? How did you know them?”

Dirk sighed. “The Rowdy Three.”

“But I thought there were– ”

“Yeah. I know. I know them from… I…” He gave Todd a thoroughly insincere and wheary smile, and suddenly he looked less like the unrelentingly cheerful elf he’d been for the past day or so and more like a man who’d looked death in the face and barely made it out alive. Todd was terrified of this smile. “Let’s just say we were all interests of the Empire at one point.”

“What does– ”

“Can we just leave it at that for now?” Dirk snapped, cutting their conversation short. Right after he finished talking the receptionist returned and Dirk watched intently as Todd made minimally friendly small talk with her before she told him where his friend was staying. He even smiled.

It was clear that Todd had already started to repress the memory of his sister basically saying she hated him and never wanted to see him again, but Dirk knew that it wouldn’t do any good to press the subject. Besides, he was a bit of an expert on repressing memories, so it would’ve been a bit hypocritical for him to scold Todd for it.

They started walking up the stairs, Todd carrying the extra key to his friend’s room. 

“So what did you mean when you said you thought the bb unit was a clue?”

Dirk beamed, happy that the conversation had wandered back into familiar waters.

“See, Todd, I was thinking; maybe meeting you wasn’t the big mistake I’d thought it was.” Todd frowned but didn’t interrupt. “I think this is a  _ case.  _ The universe  _ sent  _ me to you, because it wants me to solve Patrick Spring’s murder.”

 

~~~

Todd knew he’d said that he’d started finding Dirk’s whole ‘it’s all connected’ theory more plausible, but this seemed like a bit too much. Dirk said he thought the universe intended for Todd to be an assistant to him, an accomplice to his holistic shenanigans. Todd was a little wary of this grand scheme that Dirk had proposed. 

“I don’t know, Dirk. This still sounds like force shit to me. Do you still have the rock?”

Dirk smiled and nodded excitedly. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the purple crystal– it sat in the palm of his hand, still glowing and still emitting the friendly warmth that almost made Todd forget the look on his sister’s face that was still staring at him from the back of his head. 

Todd was about to say something when the bb unit in Dirk’s arms started freaking out. it had taken one look at the crystal and started frantically trying to escaped his grip. Dirk struggled not to drop it and instead placed it on the ground, where it started Beeping frantically. 

Todd cocked his eyebrows at it. “What do you think is wrong with it? Damn, I wish I knew how to speak it’s language.”

“It’s saying my name.” Todd glanced up at Dirk to see that his face had paled. “It’s asking if  _ I’m _ Dirk Gently.”

“You can understand it?”

“A little bit, but it seems like it doesn’t really know what it’s talking about, like it doesn’t really speak its own language. It says it has something to give to us.”

Suddenly the bb unit popped open a compartment on its front, the kind all novelty ones came with, in case the child you gave it to wanted to stuff snacks or toys inside it. 

But this unit had something else. The compartment was pretty small, so it took some prying for Dirk to remove what was inside it. Once He’d succeeded the thing was revealed to be a textured metal cylinder. They both stared down at it, supposing they should be awestruck when in reality they were really just confused.

“Where’d it come from?” Todd wondered aloud. The bb unit beeped in reply.

“She says she got it when one of the rowdies dropped it. She says we have to put the crystal in it.”

“Oh, so it’s a she now?” 

More beeps. “Yeah. She says her name is Lydia.”

“But the label says– y’know what? We can’t be taking advice from a bb unit right now. Can we please deal with this later and focus on finding my friend?”

Dirk sighed and for a moment the bb unit made a sound strangely similar to a sigh as well. “Fine. Where’s his apartment?”

“It’s right up here.” Todd said, pointing to one of the doors to the right of them. 

~~~

All the doors looked the same to Dirk, save for the small plastic labels marking each of them– although most of the labels were pretty worn, the numbers scratched and peeling and difficult to read. The whole place had a similar atmosphere; it was grimy and cramped and metallic, and it brought up uncomfortable memories in the back of Dirk’s mind.

“Gods, this place it disgusting.”

“Yeah.” Todd replied. “It’s one of those ‘pill’ hotels, y’know? Those ones where you just get one twelve by twelve room and everyone on your floor shares a bathroom.” Dirk scowled. More bad memories.

They were standing on front of the door now, Todd jiggling the keycard in the lock. 

“So this friend of yours, he’s a fan of efficiency?”

Todd scoffed. “No. He’s just cheap.”

Todd finally got the door to slide open with a mechanical hiss. As soon as it did,  Dirk was hit with the worst smell he’d ever encountered in his life. 

 

~~~

“What  _ is  _ that?” Dirk asked through a flurry of coughs. Todd didn’t answer; he was already inside the room, scrambling to find the source of the stink. 

He inspected the surroundings; everything seemed pretty much the same as it had looked when he’d slept off a hangover there a year or two earlier. A pull out bed sat against the wall to the right of him, Jyk’s various wind instruments were piled in one corner and a bong was sitting in another. The whole room was strewn with dirty clothes and old food, but none of it seemed rank enough to be the source of the smell.

Dirk coughed, this time to get Todd’s attention. 

“Todd I, uh, think I found where the smell is coming from. And your friend.” He was pointing to the spot behind the bed. Todd wandered next to him and looked down to find his friends’ body, already a couple days old, lying dead at his feet. 

“Oh.”

 

~~~

For someone who had just found out his friend was dead, Todd didn’t seem to be in the mood for mourning. He was shuffling around the hotel room, digging through Jyk’s stuff and kicking aside empty food packages with every step.

“Are we going to  _ steal  _ from a  _ dead man _ ?” Dirk asked, once he’d caught onto what to Todd was doing. 

Todd sighed beleagueredly. He turned to Dirk with an expression that asked ‘why don’t you get it?’

“I’ve been implicated in at least three crimes in the past week, Dirk, and I lost my favorite transpo, and my si– ” He paused, clearly just having remembered something “speaking of, his keys should be somewhere around here.”

Dirk had lost his attention again; Todd was now rummaging through the pockets of the coats and pants littered on the ground. He eventually let out an ‘aha!’, pulling a small black object covered with buttons and stuffing it into his pocket. He looked back up at Dirk.

“Jyk was my friend. He died, and he probably wouldn’t want me to die, too. Plus, he owed me.” Todd punctuated the end of his sentence by holding up the wallet he’d just retrieved from a pair of ratty pants. He smiled, but his happiness was interrupted by yells from the out in the hallway. 

Upon hearing the sound Dirk bolted, without thinking, out into the hallway. Todd followed behind and yelling his name.  

Out in the hallway Todd found Dirk with his ear pressed against the door across from Jyk’s apartment. 

“What are you doing?” Todd was whispering all of a sudden– he didn’t know why, but it felt reasonable. 

“There’s people in there, talking. Ooh! now someone’s yelling. It doesn’t sound like anything good.” He gave Todd a look that wasn’t quite a smile, but was something similar and just as mischievous. “We should look into it.”

“Dirk, I don’t think that’s a good idea– ” Todd’s protests were cut short, however, because Dirk had already started turning the handle, finding it to already be unlocked.

Dirk flung open the door, apparently seeing it’s open-ness as permission from the universe to barge into someone else’s hotel room. 

The next couple moments were a bit of a blur; the scene they saw when they opened the door was that of two men mid-fall, as well as a woman kicking herself into a standing position through pure strength alone.

The three of them stared at each other in total, astonished silence, until Dirk broke it;

“That wAS SO COOL.”

Todd was unable to take his eyes off of those of the woman standing in front of him. Her eyes, glowing purple in the dark of the hotel room, were ones he recognized. He hadn’t been lying to that police droid; she hadn’t been a forgettable customer. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> more chapters can't happen without positive feedback


	14. Chase

Tears were welling in Amanda’s eyes. The more she desperately tried to hide this fact from the rowdy three the more the tears came, and soon they were streaming down her face and there was nothing she could do to stop them.

She felt a comforting arm curl around her shoulders. She didn’t look up at the owner of this arm, but she recognized Martin’s profile out of the corner of her eye.

“What’s wrong, blue?” He asked, sounding charmingly raspy.

“She’s crying.” Said Gripps. The others nodded in agreement, all of them wanting to be comforting but none of them knowing exactly how to execute that sort of thing. 

“Oh, it’s nothing.” She said in a voice that made it clear that is was  _ absolutely not nothing.  _ “I only just found out that the main role model in my life isn’t who I thought he was and has been lying to me for years.” Her tone had become bitingly sarcastic.

“Your brother, right?” Asked Vogel. Amanda nodded. 

“Yeah, he seemed like a scumbag.” Martin continued.

Even just a day earlier Amanda would’ve jumped at the chance to claw out the eyes of anyone who decided to insult her brother, but at this point she couldn’t help but agree.

Amanda sighed, wiping her eyes with her fists. “It doesn’t matter now, anyway.” she looked up at the Rowdies and made an attempt at a look of clear-eyed renewal. 

“What matters is, I know where to find the Kaiber crystals.”

~~~

It had been about ten minutes since they’d cut the alien woman out of her ropes with Todd’s pocket knife, and he still couldn’t keep his eyes off of her.

It wasn’t just because he thought she was pretty– if that was true then he wouldn’t’ve been able to take his eyes off of Dirk, either– it was amazement, amazement of the fact that he was now standing in front of the woman he’d just an hour ago been questioned about in a police station.

They were now standing over the body of Todd’s friend. As soon as they’d mentioned that they were there investigating a body she’d wanted to see it, bypassing personal introductions or an explanation of why they’d found her tied up in a hotel room. 

Jyk was of a species that, in the thirty or so hours after death, would quickly begin to liquefy. So they were less looking at the body of Todd’s deceased friend as much as they were looking at a pile of loosely connected green jello inside a t shirt. 

“So, do you know how he died?” Asked the woman– Farah, as the alien text on her jumpsuit read. 

“Well, we can’t know for sure, not when his body is in this state.” Said Todd, attempting to sound as knowledgeable as possible. “Jyk had a lot of enemies, people who might want him dead. However, my best bet is he just OD’d” He pointed to a recently used syringe that had been kicked under the fold-out bed.

“So your friend...wasn’t necessarily the most  _ upright _ citizen, correct?” She glanced over to the bong Jyk had in the corner, which Todd now noticed was positioned next to a two foot long blaster gun. He didn’t reply to her question; he didn’t need to.

Dirk was very clearly bursting with questions, though, and during what he saw as a lull in the conversation he just couldn’t stop himself.

“So, what’s your  _ deal _ ? Like, who were those guys, and what’s that symbol on your uniform and,  _ most  _ importantly,  _ how do you know Patrick Spring _ ?”

Todd could imagine a normal person getting confused by Dirk’s barrage of questions, but Farah remained perfectly composed.

“I’m not sure who those men were, they kidnapped me a couple days ago and refused to give me a straight answer to any of my questions. Patrick is my  _ boss _ , and the symbol is the signet of his operation, which is a branch of the resistance. And lastly– ”

She made strong eye contact with both of them; Todd assumed this was meant to show her honesty but all it really did was intimidate him, which in the end was just as good.

“I have  _ no clue  _ what my deal is. I do not know what is going on.”

~~~

Dirk was doing everything in his power to hide how thrilled he was with his current situation. 

He’d  _ just  _ been trying to convince Todd of the existence of this case, and suddenly not one but two giant clues had dropped directly into their laps and boy were they good ones.

“ _ Wow _ ” Said Dirk, side-eyeing Todd. “What an interesting  _ coincidence  _ that we just  _ happen  _ to meet the woman the police asked you about and she just  _ happens  _ to be at the same hotel where your friend  _ happens  _ to live. Or, more accurately, had lived.” He added, glancing down to the green muck on the floor for a moment.

Todd was about to give a snappy reply when Farah turned quickly to him.

“Wait, why were the police questioning you? Why were they questioning you about  _ me _ ?”

“Well.” Dirk said before Todd had a chance to respond. “They wanted to question him about your boss’s death. They said you’d bought some poison from him a couple months ago?”

Todd sunk his nails into Dirk’s arm, but there was no stopping him at this point. The damage was done.

Farah had suddenly started to shiver slightly like a small, afraid dog. “p-Patrick is d-d-dead?” She said, rubbing her shoulders. She began sinking down onto the bed.

“God, I really am a failure. Couldn’t save him, couldn’t save Lydia, I couldn’t even stop myself from being kidnapped, I had to be saved by two  _ idiotic  _ strangers,”

Todd was about to rebut, but Dirk interrupted him once again.

“Wait, Did you say _ Lydia _ ?”

As if on cue the bb-unit, which had gone unnoticeably absent for the last couple minutes, rolled back into the room. It was once again beeping and swivelling its head frantically. 

“What’s it saying?” Todd asked Dirk. 

“She says the two men, the one from the room with Farah, they’re uh, they’re…” He listened to her intently for a couple more seconds. “They’re gone. They just...got up and left.”

Farah’s skin turned a paler purple. “They’ve gone to get more.” She stood up from the bed and turned to them. “We need to  _ leave _ .”

Todd nodded. “There’s a parking lot on the roof, Jyk’s ship should be there. We can get there by the stairs.”

~~~

The three of them immediately ran out of the door of the hotel room, Todd begrudgingly scooping up the bb-unit on the way out and Farah grabbed the blaster from the corner.

They heard yells coming from the lobby, and while they couldn’t know for sure if they were because of them they could definitely guess. 

As they ran up the stairs Todd began to hear the synchronised stomping of boots following them. He also realized that Dirk was falling behind for some reason, but every time he told him to catch up he would simply brush him off. 

They finally stopped at the top of the stairs and found themselves on a concrete island in the middle of a sea of different sky faring vehicles. Todd and Dirk were both panting profusely while Farah seemed totally unfazed. 

“Which one belongs to your friend?” she asked. Todd’s eyes scanned the lot but he was stopped when he started feeling something burning on the back of his neck.

Todd turned around to find Dirk holding what at first looked like a flashlight but he then realized was a long, glowing, stationary blue beam of light. 

“WHERE THE  _ FUCK  _ DID YOU GET THAT” Todd was yelling now, half to compete with the wind that was beating the roof and half out of pure, unadulterated surprise. 

Dirk was wearing an infuriatingly self-satisfied expression. “I did what Lydia said, I put the thing in the thing and turned it on and it did  _ this _ ” He motioned with the lightstick in a way that seemed entirely unsafe.

“Todd,  _ the ship. _ ” Urged Farah. He turned back around and finally spotted Jyk’s hard-to-miss vehicle, a neon green cruiser with dark blue decals (it was the most expensive thing his friend had ever owned). He pointed Farah to it and then turned back to Dirk. At this point the men were close enough that Todd could see the tips of their blasters rounding the corner below them. 

“Give me that.” He forced the light thingy out of Dirk’s hands and traded it for the bb unit, and then started pulling both of them towards the ship.

The three of them danced down another set of stairs and across the parking spaces, weaving between the giant looming shadows of various shipping vessels. 

Todd heard footsteps behind him, and he didn’t need to turn around to know that one of the men with guns had managed to catch up with him. He knew he couldn’t outrun him, but also that he couldn’t fight him. He looked up ahead; Farah still had the gun strapped to her back but she was too far ahead to he made a split second decision and gripped the metal hilt of the thing in his hands and swung it around blindly, not stopping until he felt it hit something heavy. 

He stopped in his tracks and opened his eyes to see one of the uniformed men lying on the ground. He wasn’t dead– at least he didn’t appear to be– but he was unconscious, a giant dark blue gash marking his chest. 

Todd was ready to turn around and catch up with Farah, when he noticed Dirk standing over the body, staring down at it with a look almost like wonderment.

“Dirk we need to get going.” He said imploringly, tugging on the edge of Dirk’s cape. He was getting worried. 

Dirk finally seemed to snap out of it. He bent down and pulled something off of the man’s shirt and then followed Todd to the ship. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all comments/reviews/kudos are appreciated!


	15. Mystery

They’d made it far enough away from the police station that Ken’s stomach had started to settle down, only for him to realize that he was hungry again. All that running really must have done something to him.

He began investigating the new ship, discovering a couple different set of clothes, some beds, and luckily no dead bodies. Ken remained pretty comforted in this fact until he heard a gunshot a couple seconds after leaving the bridge. 

He ran into the bridge and the first thing he saw there was Bart staring down at a dead body that Ken could only assume they had generated with a rather nonplussed expression.

“Bart! What did you  _ do _ ?”

Bart glanced up at him with the same expression they’d used when looking at the dead body. They pointed at the body as if he might not’ve noticed it yet.

“I killed him.”

“Well, I can see  _ that _ . But why? I mean, what did he do to deserve that?”

“He came at me. He was hiding in the closet when we got on the ship and when you left the room he tried to take me down, so I shot him. He had it coming.” The made playboxing motions with their arms as if they had fistfought the man to death rather than just shooting him in the head.

Ken was having trouble wrapping his head around what had happened. By the way Bart talked about it it seemed like the man lying on the floor had been doomed before he’d ever even gotten on the ship. 

“Are you serious? You could’ve  _ died.  _ And– and back at the police station.” He squeezed his eyes shut and pictured the young officer falling to the ground, dead at his feet.

“I can’t die.” Bart mumbled.

“Wh–  _ what _ ?” Ken asked incredulously. He was worried that Bart was actually much, much more mentally unstable than he’d originally thought, if that was even possible. 

Bart suddenly took a step way too far into Ken’s personal space and pulled out their stolen blaster. They pointed it at their temple and Ken cringed away, worried that his only current mode of protection and transportation would soon be torn away from him. 

They pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. They pumped their finger a couple more times and were met only with clicking. Then, the pointed it violently at the wall and shot it, resulting in a large, ragged, inch-deep hole in the wall of the ship, exposing the wires underneath. 

Ken stared at them with wide-eyed fear.

~~~

He didn’t feel the need to argue with Bart about any of the many insane things they’d done and said in the past hour, but he was beginning to strongly question his choice to follow them onto the ship.

He wandered back into the back room of the ship in search of food, still reeling from Bart’s performance a couple minutes earlier. There was a fridge there but it was empty, and he couldn’t find anywhere else where food might’ve been hidden. 

“Hey, Bart? We should get food. Do you have any money?”

There was a couple seconds’ silence that made him wonder if they hadn’t heard or just didn’t care, before the reply came;

“ _ I  _ don’t have any money, but there is a cash register in here.”

Ken bolted into the Bridge to find Bart inspecting a register that was balanced precariously on the control panel.

With no help from Bart Ken picked the thing up and lowered it onto the ground at their feet. He crouched by it and opened the drawer to find that it was pretty full, holding about three thousand dollars.

“Gods. Well, we’re murderers, so why not thieves, too?”

Bart snorted. “Don’t give yourself too much credit.”

“Wait– ” Ken’s fingers brushed the side of the register, where he found a plastic label advertising what seemed to be a small town diner.

“That’s not…” he looked up at Bart, looking more for an outlet for his words than for actual feedback. “The label on the side of the ship is for a shipping company.” He inspected the back of the machine to find a bunch of loose ripped-out wires.

“This register was stolen. This means…” He bit back what he was really thinking; that the man Bart had shot had actually deserved it. “This means we can get lunch.”

Bart scoffed, waving him away. “Well, I coulda told you that. Sorry, though, but I don’t eat.”

Ken was getting awfully tired of this. “You  _ have  _ to eat. And if not that,  _ I  _ need to eat.”

“You heard me. I don’t eat. Food comes to me when it needs to so I can focus on the things the universe tells me to do. Like finding Dirk Gently.”

“Yeah but i’m sure it wouldn’t ruin your life to get dinner every once in awhile? If it comes when you need it then maybe this is a sign that it’s time to eat?”  _ I haven’t seen you eat since I met you, after all. _

Bart rolled their eyes. “Fine. we can get food.” They said in a way that heavily implied they thought they were just humoring him.

~~~

After changing into some of the clean uniforms they’d found in the back of the ship and finding a place far enough from the police station that Ken wouldn’t feel worried, he and Bart were sitting across from each other over plates of food.

Ken’s mind was racing, the series of events from the last two hours finally setting in. The idea that Bart simply had a knack for killing people who coincidentally turn out to be evil later was beginning to seem further and further from the truth.

_ Maybe Bart  _ is  _ magic _ . That was the thought he kept having to push from his head.

“This is good.” Bart said, shoveling meat into their face without regards to utensils. “What is it?”

“Bavor food, from Iltrid.”

“Those aren’t words.”

“They’re planets.” He said absentmindedly as he watched them pick through the carcass of what he assumed had once been some kind of sandwich.

Bart paused to lick juice off their fingers. “I saw Dirk Gently, by the way.”

Ken gawked. “ _ What?  _ Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think you would care. I couldn’t tell if you were invested in my  _ mission  _ or not.”

He felt betrayed, but he didn’t want to admit why. Bart was making him once again feel more less like an accomplice– or even a friend– and more like a piece of cargo.

“So, did you kill him?” He asked, surprised by the nonchalance in his own voice. 

“No.”

“What? Why?” Bart had seemed so enamored with the idea of killing him that he assumed that they’d jump at the chance.

Bart spoke through a mouthful of food. “Didn’t feel right. The  _ universe–  _ ” Here they motioned with one greasy hand at everything and nothing in particular. “– Was telling me not to.”

Ken shook his head. “I’m telling you Bart, this still sounds like the force to me. I mean, with the gun jamming and everything…”

“Maybe.” Bart said, nodding in a way that made it perfectly clear that they were just humoring him. 

Ken still felt pretty in the dark about Bart’s mission, about what they thought they might accomplish or how they might find Dirk now that they’d already lost him once. He did know one thing, though; if Bart previous killings were any indicator, then this Dirk Gently must’ve been a very, very bad person.


	16. Assist

As things began to settle down and the ship was far enough away from the hotel, Todd finally began to assess how deep the shit he was in actually was. 

He was on a borderline stolen ship with two near strangers, and– no matter how scared he was to admit it– his sister had abandoned him and likely never wanted to see him again.

He’d lost his favorite ship as well, and with it many of his possessions. He did still have the duffel bag he’d been lugging around for the past day, and spent a couple minutes digging through it and taking stock of whatever possessions he had left. 

Inside he found his blaster (with only one charge left), a couple old carbon bars, his mandoviol, his and Jyk’s wallets (featuring the picture of Amanda he brought with him everywhere), the meds he hadn’t gotten the chance to give his sister, and some other assorted garbage. He tried to fight back tears as he realized this was pretty much all he had left in the world. 

After the ship had been launched Todd returned the lightstick to Dirk, a choice which ended up being the wrong one. 

Dirk stood in the main room of the ship swinging the thing around and making whooshing noises with his mouth. The bb-unit weaved between his feet with every step, beeping at him conversationally. Every once in awhile Dirk would reply to whatever it was saying or ask it a question, making Todd feel like he was hearing half of a phone conversation to which he was only partially listening.

Todd eventually forced Dirk to put the thing away when he accidentally slashed the upholstery of one of the seats lining the edge of the room, leaving the foam and stuffing underneath exposed. 

Immediately after getting on the ship Farah had run right to the cockpit before even Todd got there, pushing buttons and taking the controls and proving herself to be a fairly competent pilot– which was good, since Todd wasn’t quite in the mood to do any piloting at the moment.

~~~

Farah pulled them into the clouds above the planet, and once she found them to be sufficiently hidden she put it on autopilot and went to stand by the the window that stretched along the right hand wall of the cockpit.

Looking down at the city below, her brain traced out every street from memory, each of them etched somewhere in her mind like scars in a tree. She recognized immediately where she was– the city she’d lived in for years and flown over countless times. Suddenly there were hot tears streaming down her face and clouding her view of Leviathan.

There was someone standing behind her now. It was the shorter of the two men– the one who’d cut her ropes– and with the realization that she didn’t even know his name came even more tears. 

“I’m Todd. That’s Dirk.” He said, pointing in the general direction behind him. He waited awkwardly for a moment, and then took a step forward so he was next to her, their shoulders barely brushing. He looked down where she was looking, at the city.

“It’s really pretty, isn’t it? Its an absolute shithole, but at least it’s pretty.”

Farah sniffed, struggling to retain her last ounce of dignity. “I was on Leviathan the  _ whole time _ . I– I thought they’d taken me somewhere off-planet because keeping me on Leviathan would’ve been an underestimation of my abilities. But they kept me there anyway– and it turns out they were  _ right  _ to underestimate me.” 

She turned to Todd and saw that confused, lost expression people always wore when she started rambling like this– that expression that she hated oh so much because of how much it resembled pity.

“I kept thinking that I recognized the room I was in, but I dismissed it because I couldn’t possibly have been there before. But I was right the first time– Patrick and I went there on a stakeout once before, and I couldn’t even remember. I should’ve known how to get out of that.”

Todd made a move to put his hand on her shoulder, but apparently thought the better of it.

“You couldn’t have known... there was no way for you to escape from that.”

This was the sort of thing that people were always telling her when she started putting herself down, and every time she heard it Patrick’s voice would ring louder in her head: “Failure is not an option”. Every time she felt more and more like a failure. 

Farah pulled at part of her suit to use to wipe her face, and in the process received a burning reminder that she was injured– the mind-altering drug that is adrenaline had been keeping her mind off of it but now the pain came flooding back. Based on her unfortunately extensive history with injuries she had come to the conclusion that while her ribs weren’t broken, they were quite badly bruised.

Reflexively she bent over, sinking to the floor with her arms wrapped around her chest.

“What is– what? Are you okay?” Todd said frantically, bending over her and looking totally at a loss for what to do. 

“I’m...fine.” She groaned.

“No. No. You are  _ very clearly  _ not fine.” He said, sounding even more distraught than she felt. “Do we– We definitely need to get you to a hospital.”

Farah pushed herself into a standing position, suddenly feeling very woozy and in danger of fainting. Todd finally saw it fit to put his arm around her.

“What’s wrong with Farah?” Dirk asked as they staggered out of the cockpit and Todd helped lower Farah down onto one of the seats.

“She’s hurt. I need to steer us towards a hospital, so could you– ” 

“No.” Farah interrupted, although it came out as more of a groan than an actual word. “We can’t go to a hospital. They’ll definitely be monitoring hospitals.” 

“But you need help.”

“I’m fine. I know first aid, I just need some bandages and painkillers.”

Todd grimaced at this plan but decided not to argue. After a moment of floundering Dirk grabbed the regulation first aid kit off a shelf and handed it to Farah. She opened it and began removing the top part of her suit before glancing up at the two men, both of them standing over her with worried looks on their faces.

“Okay, so, this isn’t a judgement on your character, but I would prefer if you two were out of the room for this part.”

Dirk and Todd nodded profusely, both blushing out of embarrassment. 

 

~~~

Todd was so hasty to obey Farah’s wishes that he didn’t realize the door he was going into led to a broom closet until it was too late and Dirk had already followed in after him.

They stared at each other in surprise for a moment after Dirk shut the door behind them, and before Dirk’s face split into a giant smile.

“So, this case. Pretty good, huh?” He looks almost cute when he says it, and suddenly Todd was glad there weren’t any lights in the closet to expose the blush that was growing on his cheeks.

“It’s not a case. We’re just helping out a woman in need.” He immediately regretted referring to the two of them a ‘we’, adamant in the fact that they were in no way a unit.

“Yes but what are the  _ chances,  _ and what about this– ” He pulled the metal tube out of his pocket, causing Todd to subconsciously attempt to step away from it before realizing the closet was too small to do so– he had seen it almost cut a man in half after all.

“You said those rocks were for testing force sensibility. Maybe it’s some weird...ancient...force-y thing.” He mimed swinging it around like a sword. 

The closet was becoming hot with their breath, and combined with the physical closeness it was making it pretty hard for Todd to focus.

“Maybe.” He suddenly remembered something from those history lessons all those years ago, but it was foggy– like trying to read through a stained glass window. “I actually think I– ”

Suddenly Farah opened the door, her shirt back on her body.

“Didn’t you hear me? I said you could come back out now.”


	17. Discovery

They were all gathered in the sitting area of the ship, Dirk attempting to charm the drink machine in the kitchenette into making him a cup of tea.

“So who are you guys?” Farah asked through a mouthful of one of the carbon bars Todd had had in his bag. 

“I’m a detective.” Dirk said cheerily before Todd even opened his mouth. “Todd here is my assistant.”

“I’m not your assistant.”

“Well, you have been assisting me an awful lot for someone who’s not my assistant.” He turned to Farah to correct himself. “Todd is my  _ friend. _ ” Todd didn’t have the heart to contradict him that time. “And we have been hired to investigate the death of Patrick Spring.”

“Hired by who?”

“Hired by the  _ universe. _ ” Dirk said excitedly. The bb unit beeped up at him. “Oh, and by her.”

“Wait, what?  _ What _ ?”

“Dirk has this thing about ‘the fundamental interconnectedness of all things’ and, like, the universe talking to him and telling him stuff.”

“That sounds force-related.”

“That’s what _ I  _ said.”

“Look.” Dirk interjected. “Everything that’s happened in the past few days has lead me towards this, towards Patrick Spring’s death. That’s always how it happens when I get a case. The universe  _ want _ s me, wants  _ us  _ to be involved in this.” He wore the expression of someone exasperated by always having to explain this specific thing to people.

Farah sighed. “This sounds… this sounds pretty implausible, but it also sounds like exactly the sort of thing Patrick believed in.”

Both of them gawked at her. Even Dirk seemed surprised that anyone believed in his flighty life philosophy.

“What? What do you mean?”

“Patrick was obsessed with the force. He said he was part of an organization that took special interest in people who exhibited force-like abilities, so they could be studied. Force abilities hadn’t been displayed in anyone born in the past hundred years outside of the organization, and that fascinated him. Even after he left and became part of the resistance, the concept of the force enthralled him.”

Todd was about to reply to what Farah had said when he saw the expression on Dirk’s face– he was pale, much paler than usual, and he looked drawn into himself like he’d just remembered something important and terrifying. The expression scared him.

“What, Dirk? Do you have something?”

“What? Oh, no. Definitely not.” He looked at Farah. “That’s nothing. Everything’s connected, yeah, but these two particular things just happen not to be connected in any way. A dead end.”

“Dirk, if you know something– ” 

“I don’t.” He snapped at Todd, his eyes suddenly sharp and cynical. Todd decided to leave it alone. 

“Okay, well, what else do we have?”

“I, uh.” Dirk stared at Farah for a moment as if her uniform would somehow spell out the answer, until he seemed to have a realization.

“You said that signet, it has to do with Patrick, right?”

“Yes. It represents the branch of the resistance.”

“And you were Patrick’s…?”

“Bodygaurd.”

“Right. So, this symbol represents Patrick, basically?” 

“Basically, yes.” Farah squeezed her eyes shut in frustration. “ _ What  _ is this supposed to accomplish?”

“Well, I just find it interesting that you say that that symbol belongs to Patrick when I found  _ these. _ ” He pulled something out of his pocket. “On the uniforms of the guys who were chasing us.”

He held up a small patch of fabric, nearly identical to the ones that littered Farah’s uniform.

It was the shape of a gear; a circle lined with square teeth on the outside. Inside was an x, and in the center of the x there was a small squiggly symbol that Todd didn’t recognize. The only difference between it and the one on Farah’s uniform was that the one on her uniform had a star in the middle instead of the symbol.

Farah stared at it, eyes wide. By her expression Todd knew that her world was crashing down around her for the second time that day. Todd furrowed his brow.

“We should get you some new clothes.” 

~~~

Despite being so against going to a hospital, Farah was apparently in favor of them going to get clothes and food. Dirk argued that while they would expect them to go get medical attention, they wouldn’t expect them to be at a diner halfway across the planet. ‘We’ll have the element of surprise’, he said.

Todd paid for the clothes with money out of Jyk’s wallet, and despite her qualms with stealing from a dead man Farah managed to keep her mouth shut. 

She ended up with a pair of tight black pants, a white linen shirt and a brown vest. It wasn’t the classiest getup but it was much more comfortable and dynamic than her suffocating flight suit.

While Todd was looking for boxers– he’d been wearing the same pair for two days in a row– Dirk came out of one of the aisles holding a bright blue leather cape not unlike the yellow one he was already wearing. To Todd’s surprise, he’d somehow managed to find the most expensive item in the entire store.

“I’m  _ not  _ buying that.”

Dirk turned up his nose. “I wasn’t asking you to. I’ll buy it myself, with my own money.” Todd had no clue that Todd actually  _ had  _ any money, and thought it a bit deceitful that Dirk hadn’t informed him of this fact. 

Farah stood next to Todd after spectating this small exchange, both of them watching Dirk walk up to the check out.

“You guys don’t have a joint checking account? Aren’t you, like…” She paused for a moment, seemingly searching for the right word. “...partners? How long have you two known each other?”

Todd groaned. “We’ve known each other for around two days.”

Farah blushed. “Oh, I guess I just assumed… I mean, he called you his  _ assistant.” _

Todd nodded wearily, “Yeah. Yeah he did.”

~~~

After making their purchases Dirk insisted that they make their way to a nearby restaurant.

Farah, who’d barely eaten in the past two days, was the most fervent challenger to this plan, but eventually admitted that she was too hungry and tired to argue.

They found a small diner, and while she claimed that going to eat somewhere wasn’t an economical idea, Farah absolutely wolfed down the sandwich she ordered before moving on to the bowl of crisps that Dirk’s salad had come with.

Todd rubbed his forehead for what seemed like ten minutes straight, barely even touching the food he’d ordered.

“I’m just– I can’t really fit my head around it.” He said, ambivalent of the fact that he’d interrupted Dirk in the middle of telling Farah a story about a case involving three clones of the same wookie, all of which were murdered on the same day in three different cities.

“Can’t fit your head around what, Todd?” Dirk asked pityingly.

“This– ” He had to refrain from saying ‘case’ “ – whole situation. It’s just so... _ weird _ . I kind of want to, like, catalogue the whole thing, to figure out what our next move should be but it’s kind of getting all muddled in my head.”

Farah folded her hands in front of her, suddenly serious. “Well, why don’t you start from the beginning?”


	18. Downhill

LOCATION: the commute to a sinister meeting place. 

“Did we leave behind the bb-unit, when we left the one guy’s house?” asked the man in the passenger seat. 

“The one...You mean Patrick Spring?” replied the man who was driving. He’d gotten about twenty minutes of reprieve from conversation with his superior and he could already feel a headache coming on just from him opening his mouth. 

“Yeah, that guy. Man, he was crazy, though, wasn’t he? All slashing around with that knife and yelling ‘you’ll never take me alive!’ and all that. It was insane, right?” Riggins could only nod, allowing Friedkin to continue, “I don’t remember getting the bb unit back from him. I liked that thing.”

“I...okay.” Once again Riggins was left to choose between going along with his boss’ idiotic wishes, or to argue and be seen as insubordinate. “Do you want to...go get it? I think there’s a tracker inside it, I  _ guess  _ we could derail our assignment to go find it…” Riggins said, not bothering to remind him that the unit also had  _ the soul of a human girl inside it. _

“Yes. that sounds great. Let’s do that.”

~~~

Dirk ended up cataloguing the events of the past couple days surprisingly well. Todd only had to interject to tone down some of his hyperbole and to add his own opinion of things.

“Well, I don’t think that’s all  _ that  _ weird, really, when you lay it all out like that.” Farah said once Dirk was finished.

“They  _ sucked  _ out his  _ emotions _ .” urged Todd

“Yes, well, _that_ was weird, of course. I guess it does seem kind of… serendipitous, that you should meet me right after that droid asked you about me.” She turned to Dirk. “You said the unit told you to call her _Lydia_? That’s so…” She struggled not to say weird, since she’d explicitly said this case wasn’t that “...coincidental. That it’d have the same name as Patrick’s daughter.”

“Is it possible that Patrick had a bb unit that he decided to name Lydia?” Todd inquired. “To, like, keep him company on missions and stuff?”

Farah shook her head. “Patrick didn’t have a droid, I would know. And even if he did, he wouldn’t have had a novelty one like that.” She looked at Dirk again. “And you said it  _ told you  _ to call it that?”

“Yeah, she kept saying ‘my name’s Lydia’,  _ very  _ urgently.”

Farah scratched her chin. “That’s interesting. Droids of this size don’t usually have the mental capacity to say stuff like that.” She paused introspectively and then let out a curt laugh. “It kind of reminds me of when I was on a mission to  Amphiptere, there was this wealthy droid helping us that– ”

“ – kept trying to offer you a trip on his luxury vessel, and then ended up informing on you and you had to shoot him in the head?” Dirk finished he story smoothly. Todd and Farah both stared at him.

“How...do you… know that?” asked Farah slowly.

Dirk shrugged. “The droid told me.”

Farah stared down at her hands, her whole body suddenly tense. Her ears had perked up, suddenly pointing straight at the sky as if poised to listen for danger. “How did she… what else did she tell you?”

“I don’t remember all of it… are you sure that that’s what happened to you? She told me a bunch of stories but kept using the name ‘Edgar’, so I didn’t really pay much attention to it. Plus she seemed pretty frantic, and wasn’t making all that much sense.”

Upon hearing the name Edgar, Farah had turned the palest shade of purple they’d seen her be yet. 

“What, what’s wrong?” Todd urged, worried she might be going into some kind of alien cardiac arrest.

“That…” Farah’s tongue was thick in her mouth and making it pretty hard to get her words out. Anxiety clouded her vision. “That’s Patrick’s middle name. It’s what Lydia used– it’s what Lydia calls him.”

Todd furrowed his brow. “What? That’s so weird. Why couldn’t she just call him, like, dad or something…” He trailed off as he slowly realized what Farah was implying.

“Oh  _ shit. _ ” Dirk said, clearly reaching some kind of conclusion before either of them. He bolted up from the booth and began making a beeline for the door, leaving the others to follow.

~~~

Lydia’s life had become extremely weird in the last few days. She’d been kidnapped, left for dead– or at least left for trapped. Then she’d been interrogated by a pair of extremely intimidating droids, stolen from a police station, and had met the man her father had told her about, all within forty eight hours. 

Things had calmed down, now, though; the two men had come to save her. While her thoughts were still muddled– such as it is when you try to fit a human mind in a novelty bb-unit– she could tell didn’t really like the small man, but the tall colorful one who was called Dirk was nice and called her by her real name (this was good because he was, according to her father, the one who was going to save her). There was a third one on the ship, too, but she hadn’t quite gotten a good look at them yet.

Despite all this confusion, however, she’d found solace in one thing; that she wouldn’t have to see the two men who’d killed her father ever again. At least, so she thought.

This was why she nearly shut down when she saw them looming above her, standing in the middle of the ship. 

She didn’t recognize them at first, of course, because her first view of them was their feet. Slowly her eye traveled up their legs and to their faces, one of which was smiling and the other of which was not.

She was so distressed at seeing them that she immediately felt blackness creeping into the edge of her vision. She did, however, summon the strength to try and roll away, but her body was small and slow now, and was still having trouble controlling it. She felt herself immediately get scooped up by the taller man.

That was the second time she’d be spending an hour in the back of their cruiser that week.

~~~

Dirk didn’t know how he’d reached the conclusion he’d come to, but this type of confusion was a regular setting for him. He could hear Todd and Farah calling questions after him, and occasionally he’d shout back an answer, but he was so full of momentum that he could barely focus on that. Plus his legs were a lot longer than theirs, so it wasn’t long before he couldn’t hear their questions at all. 

~~~

Todd flashed back to his experience on Tiber as his legs slowly began to fail him in the streets of Leviathan. His legs were burning, acid flooding his muscles as his body pleaded that he stop running. It wasn’t long before Farah’s trained body whizzed past him.

Dirk’s bright blue form was easy to follow through the crowd, until it wasn’t anymore. Todd suddenly realized that he’d lost sight of both of his companions, and was beginning to lose hope in this entire mission as well.

His run slowed to a walk, and then to a stroll. He was pretty sure he was going in the direction of the ship, but was so tired he could hardly muster the amount of worry it would take to care about that.

He jumped when he felt a hand curl around his arm. He turned to find Farah walking alongside him, despite having just been a couple yards ahead of him. He refrained from asking if whatever species she belonged to had the ability to teleport, for fear of looking stupid. 

“I lost him” She said. Todd silently resented the fact that she’d seemingly barely broken a sweat.

“You couldn’t catch up with him?” Todd asked, only a hint of sarcasm creeping into his voice.

“I  _ could’ve.”  _ She said, hands on her hips. “I just didn’t think it was that pressing of an issue. I mean, we know where he’s going, and he’s a grown man. How much  trouble could he possibly get into?”


	19. Conversation

Someone was talking to Dirk– specifically, Scott Riggins was saying words with his mouth that were directed at Dirk– but Dirk, for many reasons, was having a bit of difficulty listening. He stared at the former general’s moustache as it moved above his lips instead of listening to whatever he was saying. It was a moustache he’d thought he’d never have to see again. Bad memories bubbled in his mind.

“What are  _ you  _ doing here?” Dirk said, interrupting whatever spiel Riggins was spouting. Annoyance flashed across his face for an imperceptible moment before it was replaced yet again by amiability. 

“And who’s that?” Dirk asked before Riggins could reply. He pointed a shaking finger at the tall, muscular man Riggins had brought with him, before laying eyes on the droid in Riggins arms.

“And what  _ the fuck  _ are you doing with Lydia?”

 

~~~

Friedkin wanted to react to the fact that this dude somehow knew the droid’s real name, but showed an uncharacteristically high level of restraint by not doing so. He simply let his eyes travel continuously between Riggins and this new guy like he was watching an eventful game of tennis.

He was attempting to glean what kind of relationship his employee had with this new man– Riggins had called him ‘Svlad’ – except he had never been particularly good at that sort of thing. 

Was Riggins his father? They didn’t look alike and Riggins had never mentioned having a child– or had he? Friedkin rarely paid attention when he talked about anything other than their current operation. 

Maybe they were coworkers? Friedkin  _ had _ paid enough attention to notice that Riggins spoke fondly of some dumb pet project he’d worked on many years ago, but this new guy looked way too young to have been a part of that. 

They were yelling now– specifically Svlad was yelling, while Riggins remained eerily calm. The conversation was becoming increasingly harder to follow, and Friedkin was already pretty bad at following conversations– even ones he was apart of.

Friedkin– who was usually quick to act but had been made slow by his own confusion– didn’t react until he saw Svlad begin to lunge forward to grab the bb unit out of Riggins’ arms. He then whipped out his blaster and jumped in front of Riggins to point it directly at Svlad’s forehead. 

In his experience this action would usually calm down whatever situation he was in– or at least serve to shut people up– but instead Svlad and Riggins just started yelling even louder– except now they were both yelling at him. From this vantage point he noticed that tears were welling in Svlad’s eyes, but otherwise his expression was that of fierce defiance.

It took him a second to realize that Riggins was telling him to stand down. He knew that he didn’t have to listen to him– he often forgot that he was the superior because he was so used to taking orders rather than giving them– he could easily shoot Svlad right now and that would be one more of his problems gone. 

He didn’t get a chance to make a move either way, though, because suddenly Dirk was holding something– and while he couldn’t tell exactly  _ what  _ it was, he could infer that it was deadly. 

~~~

The gun had been a bit of a curveball. Dirk was pretty used to have guns pointed at him– it’d happened at least three times in the past week– but rarely was it from so close a distance. 

It was scarier this way; not until very recently that Dirk had become acquainted with the feeling of being so close to someone who so easily could– and, if given the chance,  _ would _ – kill him. He’d felt it in the room with the Rowdies, and when he’d talked to the droids at the police station. He hadn’t had time to feel it when Todd had hit him over the head with the crowbar, but probably would’ve if he’d been allowed to.

Thinking back to this moment when recounting these events in the future, Dirk would insist that he hadn’t chosen his next move; that it had just  _ happened  _ to him, the way so many things did. Todd wouldn’t be willing to hear any of that, though; he’d simply insist Dirk’s actions were part of his innate instincts as a force user. Dirk would let him believe that. 

Now Dirk was holding the lightsword between him and the man with the gun. It had felt warm in his pocket, and in his hand it felt strangely comfortable, like it had been made with him in mind. While he still didn’t think he was any match for a gun, Dirk assumed he could at least take some of this guy’s limbs with him before dying.

Instead of just taking the shot, however, the other man slowly lowered his gun to his side. He looked at his companion with a thoroughly confused expression, looking totally out of his depth. 

Dirk stared at Riggins, now thoroughly shell-shocked. He wielded the thing like he used to wield stuffed toys and safety blankets when asked to do something he didn’t want to, except this time Riggins was much less likely to tear it from his hands.

Riggins stared intently at the blue beam of light. “I see.” He mumbled cryptically. He then shifted the bb-unit in his arms and motioned for his companion to follow. Dirk just let them leave, because despite how cool he was playing it he was pretty sure he’d have an aneurysm if he had even one more gun pointed at him. 

Before stepping off the ship Riggins glance back at Dirk for a moment.

“Please consider my offer, Svlad. We could really use someone like you in our operation.” He gave a terrifying grin before shoving his way out the door.

~~~

As Todd approached the ship he witnessed two guys he didn’t recognize stepping out.  He stopped out of sheer surprise for a second before continuing to run towards them after realizing one of them was holding the bb unit– He didn’t really care all that much about the droid, but he’d be damned if someone was going to steal from a ship that he himself had stolen. He didn’t get very far, though, because as soon as he did so the other one pulled a gun on him.

He stared ahead for a moment, totally frozen, before Farah’s all too calm voice came from behind him; “Stand down, Todd.”

He cautiously took two steps backward before watching the two men’s backs recede into an unmarked cruiser parked next to their stolen ship.

As soon as they took off Todd became unstuck from his position on the sidewalk and ran into the ship to find Dirk standing frozen in the middle of the main room. Todd didn’t hesitate to rush up to him and hold his arm, attempting to shake him out of whatever fog he was in. 

“Dirk are you alright? Who were those guys? Did they hurt you?” 

Dirk didn’t  _ look _ injured, but his expression was that of someone about to have their arm amputated and was less than excited about it. He was refusing to make eye contact and remained rooted to his spot in the middle of the ship. 

Todd moved to stand in front of Dirk, gripping both his arms and staring desperately up at him. He could feel, now, that his heart was hammering.

“Dirk, what’s wrong?”

Dirk opened and closed his mouth a couple times uselessly. He held up a fist and revealed the hilt of the light sword sitting there, still smoking from when he’d unsheathed it. They both stared at it,  hoping for it to yield some answers– although the questions they were both asking were some totally different ones.

“What happened, you guys? What happe–” 

Todd turned towards the sound of Farah’s voice before it was interrupted by a new, infinitely more terrifying one. 

“Dirk Gently?” inquired a filthy figure standing in the doorway behind them.


	20. Found

Est-vz was sitting and tapping incessantly away at the clunky computer that inhabited the corner of his and ZiM’s shared office. Many of their possessions and files had been destroyed during the mutiny, but luckily the clunky brick of a thing had survived. Perhaps the criminals that had run rampant in the station the hour before hadn’t seen it as worth their trouble.

Many people come to the conclusion that Droids are naturally skilled at working with computers (considering that they technically  _ are  _ computers) but this thought process is entirely incorrect and maybe even a little bit racist. Not every human being is a brain surgeon, after all. 

Zim came in holding his favorite empty mug and sat down at his desk before glancing over to his partner.

“You got something, E? You seem awfully hard at work there.”

Est-vz gritted his nonexistent teeth. “Before the droid got stolen I entered it into evidence, which involved putting its code into our database. Which means…” He pressed a couple more buttons uselessly “...we should be able to track its location.” 

He finally sat back in his chair defeatedly. “If only I wasn’t totally shit at using this thing.”

“Let me give it a swing.” ZiM said, assuming incorrectly that this situation required only a more experienced hand. 

He stood above the computer for a couple minutes, scanning the screen. He pushed three buttons before came to the conclusion that they required someone whose job it was to do this kind of thing.

One call to the IT department later and Est-vz and his partner finally had a precise record of everywhere the bb unit had been for the past week, including after it had been captured.

Well, at least mostly.

“What do you mean  _ mostly _ ?” Est-vz asked urgently. He was already more stressed than he’d ever been what with the loss of their suspect and the breakout of the police station, and now this.

“Well.” continued the young lady that IT had sent down to assist them. She pressed a finger to the little red blinking dot on the screen that represented the lost droid. “What I mean is we can only find  _ most  _ of its whereabouts. See, here is where the unit was four hours after leaving the station. It’s by the side of a road so i’m going to assume that it’s in a parked vehicle. It stays there for a while and then…” She pressed a button and the dot began moving again. “It starts moving, but only for a second before it just– ”

The red dot disappeared mid-blip, leaving not a single trace. 

“Yes, yes.” Said ZiM dismissively, a little hesitant to admit how vital this woman and her little red dot were to their current investigation. “But what does it  _ mean _ ?”

The woman shrugged, and made a motion to put her legs up on the desk before thinking better of it. “I don’t know. My best guess is that whoever has it now took the hard drive out. They probably knew that someone might be tracking it, and so by doing that they insured we can’t track it anymore.”

“If they put it back in, will we still be able to track it?” Est-vz asked worriedly– if they couldn’t, then that would be a major setback in their investigation. ZiM was equally worried about this new development, but was better at hiding it. 

“I doubt it.” Said the girl after a moment. 

ZiM’s shoulders drooped, and he began to rub the place in his chest populated by his own hard drive. He could only imagine how painful having it removed might be, and he once again felt a pang of pity for the little droid. 

“You’re free to go.” He said, waving away the IT worker.

After she’d left Est-vz glanced cautiously over to his partner. “Well? What do we do now?”

ZiM thought for a moment, staring at the glossy map covering the screen of the computer. 

“We should retrace the steps– or the path or whatever– of the droid. Whoever took it must’ve gone somewhere useful to our investigation.”

Est-vz nodded. He could alway trust his partner to line up a logical next step, although whether it would actually be useful or not would be a gamble.

 

~~~

For once Bart drove with purpose, and this fact terrified Ken to his very core. They weren’t just pointing them in any old direction anymore; this time they’d directed this new ship in a very specific direction, and every once in a while would whip them into a new street like they actually knew where they were going. They remained glued to the steering wheel, but while they seemed to know where they were going they weren’t paying any attention to the gps, or street signs, or the other drivers for that matter.

“Where are we goOOIing?” He asked, his voice breaking as Bart turned them down yet another side street and he struggle to retain his grip on the passenger seat.

“I can feel him.” Bart mumbled, their voice so low he wondered if the statement was even meant for him. 

“Feel  _ who,  _ Bart?”

Bart shrugged and raised their eyebrows condescendingly. 

“Oh.  _ Oh. _ ” Ken sat finally sat down and looked intently at Bart’s unusually focused expression, no longer bothering to hide his interest in her universe-appointed mission.

“So, you know where you’re going?”

For the first time since picking him up, Bart was annoyed at Ken– rather than it being the other way around. They were trying to focus on the thin string that was pulling them in a certain direction, like a spiderweb around their heart. While it was stronger than most of the impulses they felt, even the tiniest distraction could break it.

“I dunno street names or nothin, only what direction to go in. It’s like a gut feelin, a pull that i can’t really explain at the moment” they said, before once again twisting them violently around another corner. 

“Like a meet cute but for murder?”

Bart grunted annoyedly. Ken nodded as if he understood, when really he just didn’t want to agitate Bart any further.

Eventually they screeched unexpectedly to a halt in front of a hideous neon-painted recreational vehicle. Ken felt a pang of anger in his chest at the sight of it; the thing was expensive and high tech– a true marvel of engineering– and whoever owned it had decided to grace it with the worst, most disrespectful paint job Ken had ever seen.

If this was any indication of what was to come, Ken could already tell that he wasn’t going to like this Dirk guy. 

The pulled up just in time to see the ship parked next to it pulling away, but neither of them saw that fact as being at all related to their current mission.

Bart lumbered up to Dirk’s ship and pushed open the door, which was of course totally unlocked. Ken paused for a moment, feeling deja vu to the moment back on Leviathan, except this time he was pretty positive that he would just keep walking in Bart’s footsteps. He gave little thought how sure he was that he would be witness– and even accomplice– to the murder that was soon to happen within the bowels of this ship, whereas the Ken of days before would’ve been torn apart at the thought of such an act of violence occurring before his very eyes.

He knew Bart’s motivations, now– or at least, he had a general feel for them– and he even trusted them enough to know that if they said someone needed to be murdered they were probably right. If his experiences so far were any indication, the death would probably happen anyway without Barts intervention, and they were only there to increase the efficiency of the whole process.

Kens moral reverie was interrupted, however, with a quiet whirring sound preceded by multiple gunshots. He ran inside hastily, not wanting to miss out on the show. 


	21. Learning

Words were difficult for Bart, as were expressions. This wasn’t to say that they often made it their business to learn what other people were saying or feeling, only that on the rare occasions they did it took more brain power than it was worth.

Being around Ken wasn’t too hard; they clicked with him in a special way that meant that his words took little deciphering. But in a room where at least three people were yelling at them all at once, three people they didn’t even  _ know,  _ well that was a bit much for them. 

But there was one specific expression, and one specific word that Bart could easily understand. They saw that expression on Dirk’s face as he uttered that one, oh so special word;

“ _ Fuck” _

_ ~~~ _

It took a couple hours to get to Tiber, which didn’t surprise Amanda in the slightest. When you live on the very edge of a galaxy you get used to long travel times (not that Amanda had been travelling much the past couple years).

The Rowdy Three, however, were much less accustomed to this. They liked– and almost needed– to live their lives fast and loose, and this was hard to do when sitting on your ship with nothing to do for four hours.

“It’s so  _ boring _ .” Vogel proclaimed for the third time that hour, and for the third time that hour the other rowdies nodded in agreement.

“I know, Voges. We’ll be there soon.” Martin mumbled before looking to Amanda for confirmation, clearly not knowing if this answer was true or not. Amanda simply nodded dismissively before preparing to ask the question that had been swimming in her head since leaving the police station.

“So what did you guys  _ do  _ to me, exactly? I mean, back there at the warehouse, and at my cottage? And, was it the same thing you did to Dirk at the police station, or was that different? Does it have something to do with the Force? Are you guys, like…” She hesitated to even say the word that she hadn’t heard uttered aloud in almost thirteen years, and it ended up coming out as a reverent whisper; “... _ Jedi,  _ or something?”

Despite how long she’d spent composing and rehearsing the questions in her head, she still felt like a little blurting out frivolous questions about the universe to her exasperated teacher (an experience that she was already very familiar with, having been an extremely curious kid).

The other rowdies seemed just as confused as Amanda by her flurry of inquiries, but Martin seemed to understand perfectly.

“Listen, girl. We’re not Jedi, or whatever it was you said. But the force...yes, that could be the best descritor for what we do.” Gripps seemed about to say something but apparently thought the better of it. In fact, all of them seemed uncharacteristically quiet, almost reverent. 

“We EAT the extra FORCE in the universe. Wherever there’s and OVERFLOW, we go.” Cross piped up unexpectedly.

“Ha! That rhymed.” Gripps barked. He and Cross fist-bumped.

“So when I have my attacks… It’s like an overflow of the force… and you…absorb it? Does that mean I’m force sensitive?”

Martin shrugged “Could be. Or could be that the force just happened to choose you as an outlet for its energy.”

“Like a faucet! You open up and all that dang energy just comes pouring out!” Vogel said, doing the motion of twisting on a sink and making a water-like ‘fssssh’ sound with his mouth. Amanda wasn’t sure how she felt about being compared to a faucet, but decided not to address it. 

“And Dirk? Is he force sensitive?” Amanda found the concept that Todd– who had always been staunchly anti-force– would end up teaming up with a Jedi ironic and even a little funny.

“We don’t  _ know _ .” Said Vogel. “We don’t know his whole  _ life story _ . We’re not his  _ aunts  _ or  _ whatever. _ ” the rowdies grunted in agreement.

“Okay. Okay.” Amanda said calmly. She was attempting, unsuccessfully, to understand everything this conversation had uncovered, and past that, all the events that had occured in the past days. 

She thought about what Martin had said about her being an outlet for the Force’s access energy, and let out a terse laugh.

“Man, this sucks.” 

~~~

Dirk had lost count of how many times he’d had a blaster aimed at him from point blank range in the past week, not that he’d been trying to keep track in the first place. He’d’ve expected to get tired of it after a while, but he was wrong. It was equally terrifying every time.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Todd take a step towards the person who was pointing the gun, and in a moment of strange clarity, Dirk ordered him to stop. Even more surprisingly, Todd actually did stop. He stared bewilderedly at Dirk and then down at himself, as if he wasn’t quite sure what had just happened.

Dirk didn’t have time to deal with that, though. He fixed his eyes back on the person pointing the gun.

“You Dirk Gently?” They asked, sounding like they didn’t really expect an answer and were probably planning to kill him either way.

“Y-yes”

They grinned and took another step towards Dirk threateningly. 

They pulled the trigger.

 

~~~

Bart had never missed before, but hey, there’s a first time for everything I guess.

Their first instinct  _ should’ve  _ been to check that their gun was working properly, but since this had never happened before they didn’t really have an instinct to go by. Instead they threw it on the ground and started marching towards Dirk, afraid of this new experience but not willing to stop their murder spree for anyone. 

“ _ Stop _ ” Dirk said in hurried desperation– it had worked on Todd, after all– but the person just kept walking. 

The person was in front of Dirk in a flash, grasping his lapels and pulling him within inches of their face. 

Dirk’s life was flashing before his eyes, and that certainly didn’t do to help his mental state. He heard Todd yelling something, but he was too busy visualizing his own death to listen. 

“Any last words?” THe person growled.

Dirk was reeling. His mind was barely functioning, the room had suddenly decided to start spinning, and his ears were ringing for some godawful reason. He could barely register what the person had said to him and ended up blurting the first thing that came to mind.

“ _ Everything’s connected. _ ”

Silence, for somewhere between thirty seconds and thirty years. Dirk hazarded to crack his eyes open. 

The other person’s eyes had grown wide with something like fear, and slowly they began to lower him onto the ground and release his lapels. 

“Y-you’re like me.” They stuttered. 

Dirk didn’t get a chance to reply, though, because suddenly there was something hot and burning being held within inches of his leg. His attacker stumbled backwards, revealing a large gash in their leg created by the lightsword, which Farah was now holding. 


	22. Investigators

ZiM diligently followed the trail dictated by the tracker in the bb unit, with Est-vz following aimlessly behind him. The path was so meandering that ZiM was sure that whoever had stolen the unit had no clue what they were doing, or where they were going. 

“We’re dealing with someone who isn’t local to Leviathan.” ZiM said, more to himself than to his partner– who had stopped a couple steps behind to inspect the window of a storefront because, as he put it, ‘anything could be a clue’. ZiM really thought they were getting a hang of this detective thing. 

They’d determined that the bb unit had stopped multiple times on its journey, the first one taking place at a pill hotel called The Zoo. They’d decided to make that their first stop. 

They rounded a corner and ZiM spotted the hotel, although it took a little work considering that the place was swarming with bulky black cars and cruisers bearing gear symbols on the doors. Weaving between the cars were large alien men in grey jumpsuits, all of them seemingly the same species with long ears and bald heads. 

“What’s going on here?” Est-vz asked after finally catching up to his partner.

ZiM did a motion similar to a shrug. “Looks like a freelance police force. Something must’ve happened here that the owners don’t want Leviathan police to know about.” This explanation seemed satisfactory to him, but somewhere in his hard drive he couldn’t help but feel like there was something off. The symbol on the sides of all of the cars seemed eerily familiar. 

They walked in and Est-vz made his way up to the desk to make conversation. The secretary seemed totally nonplussed by the amount of besuited men who were crawling around the building. 

“What happened here?” Est-vz inquired. The woman shrugged.

“Someone found a dead body in one of the rooms, and alla the sudden these guys showed up.” She mentioned generally to the lobby, as if they might not have noticed the men previously.

Est-vz tensed and glanced at his partner, who nodded sagely. This was definitely a  _ thing _ .

Est-vz turned back to the woman behind the desk. 

“Seems like a lot of fanfare for one little body. Mind if we take a look?” He asked, pulling out his resistance-issued fake police badge and flashing it at her. She shrugged again and grunted, clearly just wishing all these people would leave so could go back to not doing her job.

“I agree, but I’m not the one who called ‘em. Dunno know who did. You can go look if you want– ‘s on the third floor– but it’s not much. I seen it.”

The two droids shared a glance and then made a beeline for the stairs leading off of the room. 

“It’s weird, right?” Est-vz said once they were out of earshot of the desk. “That there’s so many private officers here? Do you really think this could have something to do with whoever stole the droid?”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions quite yet.” ZiM warned, having himself already thoroughly jumped. 

 

~~~

It wasn’t hard to identify which door the body was behind. The crowd of men thickened as they neared it, and Est-vz took to counting them– he’d catalogued thirty in this hallway alone, each virtually indistinguishable from the last (not that Est-vz had ever been that good at distinguishing one organic being from another in the first place).

Eventually Est-vz had to forcefully part the crowd to get into the room– room forty-two– carefully rationing his strength as to not injure anyone, although the alien officers didn’t seem to acknowledge them (in fact, if they had paid attention the two detectives would’ve noticed that the men were either engrossed in whispered conversations or standing totally still and staring off into space). 

The room was filthy, and while the two droids were without the ability to perceive scent ZiM still cringed away at what he assumed was probably a terrible smell, just based on visual cues.

“It’s  _ revolting _ .” Est-vz said, soon to discover that what he had first concluded to be a terrible spill of some kind was actually the body they were looking for.

As they were inspecting the green substance on the ground, Est-vz’s impeccable hearing honed in on some whispering going on outside of the door. He focused in on it, and clamped onto his partners arm to signal that he was onto something. 

“I dunno who they are, but they’re definitely not Leviathan police.” After a couple moments Est-vz identified the voice as that of the woman from the front desk.

“Their fake badges were good, but I’m better.” Here Est-vz could hear a proud smile in showing through in her voice. He saw out of the corner of his sensor that ZiM– who had considerably worse hearing than Est-vz– was looking at him curiously, clearly wondering what his partner had discovered. 

Whoever the woman was talking to– assumably one of the uniformed men– simply grunted in reply, and soon enough the two investigators could both hear the sound of jack-booted feet marching in their direction. 

The two of them stiffened and shared a look. Their built-in fight responses– which they had gained both from their programming and their time in the resistance– began to kick in.

Quickly they both assessed that there were no ways to escape the room, which only had one door that was quickly becoming less of an option.

A quick scan of the room revealed, unsurprisingly, that there were no weapons. Est-vz decided not to take out his blaster, with the hope that he might not have to resort to violence just yet. He did, however, hover his hand tentatively over its place in his jacket. He saw that his partner– who was often more confident in such delicate situations– remained with his hands clenched steadfastly at his sides. 

~~~

There were three tall, menacing alien men standing in the doorway– at least, that ZiM could see, although he was sure that there were even more waiting in the hallway outside.

“What do yous want with this body? What whereabouts it interests you?” Asked one of them, sounding surprisingly closer to a confused child then to the professional wrestler that ZiM had expected.

“We’re investigators. We investigate.” Est-vz answered from beside him. He sounded surprisingly confident, but the two had known each other long enough to know when the other was doing a lot of work to hide how they scared were. This was one of those times. 

The second man piped up. “But you ain’t. Investigators, that is. Th’lady ousside said ya’s id’s is fake, so.” He hoisted up the menacing crossbow in his arms, his two companions following suit seconds later. “Ya better answer our questions. And tells us who ya really are.”

“Y-yeah!” said the third, who was clearly the least confident of the group. “Questions like, were you the ones who knocked out Zed and Fred? A-and if you didn’t, do you know who did? Who were those guys? Th-the ones with the bb unit? The lil mousy guy, and the weird dude, and- and the alien lady?”

His two colleagues shot him resentful looks, silently scolding him for either getting too ahead of himself or accidentally giving up important information. This gave ZiM and Est-vz enough time to share a glance.  _ So this  _ is  _ connected  _ was the thought they were both having.

ZiM looked intently at the tips of the crossbows the men were holding, which crackled with a strange blue energy. He scanned their uniforms, synthetic eyes stopping at the gear symbol that they’d seen on the cars outside. There was something all too fishy with this whole situation, and he felt terrible about not being able to accurately communicate this fact to his partner.

One of the men took a step forward, and in a moment of terrible instinct ZiM’s hand shot into his jacket, clasping around the handle of his blaster. 

Wrong move. 

~~~

One of the uniformed men fired his crossbow with a metallic  _ twang _ , the charged arrow making a beeline for ZiM’s torso.

Est-vz stared at his partner, and then at the man holding a crossbow. The surprise and fear was apparent on his face despite its relative emotionlessness.

After giving himself a moment to be shocked, however, he bolted forward. He made a sound like something metal being crushed in a trash compactor. He was now standing over where ZiM had collapsed on the ground, wildly firing on the men in the doorway through a haze of blinding rage.

He wrapped his partner’s limp arms around his shoulders, and through some miracle managed to make it out into the hallway after taking out a couple more of the men in the grey jumpsuits– only a few of which were equipped with the crossbows, apparently.

_ This is so bad.  _ He kept thinking.  _ This is, quite literally, the worst possible way that this could’ve turned out.  _

Even despite being weighed down by the body of his partner, Est-vz’s robotic legs still put him well ahead of his pursuers. 

He made his way up to the parking garage on the top floor, unsure of what he would do if he got there. He just knew that backtracking would give him an even worse fate than whatever was waiting for him in the garage.

He found a corner behind one of the ships, the sound of running boots slightly more distant but still present. 

He finally got a chance to inspect his partner’s wound, and it was much, much worse than he’d thought.

There was a ragged hole torn in his front by the tip of the arrow, which was still planted in the middle of the wound. Est-vz could see which parts of him were being affected by the charge of the arrow, some of the wires and screws that the injury had ripped apart were crackling with a strange blue electricity. There was something undeniably sketchy about this wound, but Est-vz didn’t really have the time or resources to assess that fact.

He kept hearing a strange groaning whir, realizing that it was actually coming from his partner. He wasn’t looking so good, the lights that represented his eyes were sunken and dull. 

“It’s okay, ZiM. We’re gonna– you’re gonna be okay.” If he’d been able to cry he would’ve been fighting off tears right now. 

ZiM’s sputtered, and Est-vz heard the sound of another motor breaking somewhere inside here. 

“You...you need to leave, E. It’s not safe for you here. I’d just weigh you down.”

“What? No. No no. I’m taking you with me. We’ll go back to the station, and we’ll...we’ll regroup there. And this will all be  _ fine.”  _

ZiM jumped up, grabbing his partner by the lapels of his jacket. His previously dull eyes were now filled with burning anger.

“No, E.  _ Listen to me. _ I am past the point of no return.  _ You. Have. To. Go. _ ”

Est-vz took one last look into his partner’s eyes, the truth that he’d been furiously been denying for the past couple moments finally came into stark relief.

He ran. He ran and he didn’t look back.


	23. Pain

Bart was floating. They no longer had legs, or arms, or a physical being. 

At least, that’s how they felt; as if they weren’t a person but instead were a floating ball of anger and pain– none of which they could act on, because they were also currently mid-fall.

They were caught, unexpectedly, by a pair of arms that through their haze of pain they managed to identify as Ken’s.

“What the  _ fuck _ .” Came his voice from somewhere above them.

~~~

Ken hated the feeling of being late to a party– not that he went to many parties, but he’d been to enough to know the feeling– and that was the feeling he got stepping into Dirk’s ship. 

The scene he walked in on was chaotic: he recognized Bart stumbling backwards towards him and managed to catch them mid fall. He uttered words of astonishment as he surveyed the scene. There was someone across the room who he could only assume was Dirk, standing frozen in place with a blood splatter across his right leg. 

A couple feet between them was a woman– presumably the source of Bart’s injury– who was holding…

Ken’s eyes went wide as he realized what it was.

_ A lightsaber. A real, actual fucking lightsaber.  _

Ken was brought out of his intense shock when Bart finally managed to struggle, with his help, into a standing position. They were on their feet, but their posture was even more hunched than usual and their breath as worryingly beleaguered.

They glared around the room and then turned to the woman holding the saber. 

“I’m taking this.” They said, moving to snatch the sword out of her hand. The woman was so caught off guard by this that she let the thing just slip from her grasp.

Bart then turned to Ken, and he finally got a look at their face. They looked weirdly cognizant and clear– more than he could say for anyone else in the room– like they’d just realized something that had been haunting them for their whole life. 

“Let’s go, Ken.”

~~~

It was after they finally made it back to their stolen ship that Bart collapsed onto the ground, clutching their injury and making a sound so loud that Ken worried his hearing might never be the same again. 

He bent down and hovered his hands over them, unsure whether he should help, or inspect the wound, or comfort them in some way. To be honest he was a little afraid to touch Bart at all.

“You’re fine, you’re fine, you’re fine.” He cooed over and over and over again, before Bart managed to muster up a reply through their whines.

“The universe is BROKEN, Ken!” They sobbed. “Th- this wasn’t ever supposed to  _ happen. _ ”

Ken took his hands away for a moment in confusion. “Are you telling me you’ve never been hurt before?  _ Like at all _ ?”

“I  _ told  _ you Ken! This– this  _ never _ happens!”

Despite their arguably dire situation Ken couldn’t help but smile. “Bart, everyone gets hurt. That’s  _ life,  _ and you can’t expect to go through it without experiencing pain.”

Bart gave him a look of pure vitriol and rage and let out a long, primal scream. And, despite how terribly afraid of Bart Ken still was this felt less like the roar of a fierce predator than the meow of an angry cat after you try to get your sock out of its mouth. He fought off yet another smile. 

~~~

He eventually– and against all odds– managed to get them into the ruddy half bath that occupied the corner of the ship. There he sat them down on the toilet and got to work cleaning up their wound.

Every time he touched Bart with the washcloth that he’d covered in water– which was cold, since that seemed to be the only temperature water the sink was able to dispense– they’d once again screech and giver him an angry glare (although they did eventually stop trying to claw his eyes out).

Once he’d cleaned away the blood Ken was relieved to find that the wound wasn’t all that bad– at least, to his untrained eye. It wasn’t the kind of thing that could rend muscle from bone more than it was the kind of scrape a kid might get when falling from a tree. 

“So you didn’t kill him.” He said after a while, only realizing seconds later how blunt her sounded.

Bart scowled at him. “Obviously not.” They said hoarsely. 

“Has that ever happened before?”

“No.” They said. They looked ashamed for a moment, before the tears started coming up again.

“It’s all just  _ useless _ , anyway. It’s pointless, this whole mission has been absolutely  _ pointless. _ ”

Ken felt the strange urge to comfort them, but you couldn’t exactly take the same approach to Bart the way you could with other people. He floundered for a couple moments.

“Bart, why haven’t you killed me yet?”

Bart stared up at him with those unexpectedly big, childlike eyes. Those eyes looked confused for a moment before Bart shrugged and looked away. 

“Same reason I ain’t killed most people I ever met. I didn’t feel like it.”

Ken considered this for a couple seconds. 

“Did you  _ ‘feel like it’ _ when you were pointing a gun at that Dirk guy?”

Bart looked contemplative. “Well, I...the universe…”

“I’ll take that as a no.” Ken stood, just having finished wrapping Bart’s wound with some bandages from under the sink. 

He looked down at Bart with obvious disappointment. “Bart, I’ve seen you kill a guy with a look.  _ This is force related.  _ And if that’s true– which it is– then this is outside of either of our control.  _ You’re magic, Bart. _ ” He said, thinking back to the moment when he’d first seen the lightsaber.

“And while you certainly can’t expect everything to go perfectly, you also can’t just give up because of a little scrape.”

Bart looked conflicted, but Ken was sure that he’d gotten through to them. He’d always been quite persuasive.

Finally, Bart looked up at him. They smiled at each other.

~~~

Dirk was sitting on the floor in the corner, against the wall. Every part of his body language and appearance suggested that he was totally calm and composed, save for his eyes, which were wide and pale and seemingly staring at everything and nothing at all. 

Farah went to sit next to him, but she seemed totally unsure of what to do past that. Neither of them spoke.

Todd was surprised by how much he yearned to comfort Dirk. His heart hurt seeing him like this, but his brain forced him to remain rooted to the spot– presumably out of shock. 

He eventually managed to make his way over and sat on the other side of him. He and Farah shared a look over Dirk’s immobile form. Both of them were so clearly at a loss for words.

So they just sat like that, for a while. Farah let out something almost like a laugh. She couldn’t help but marvel at and reflect on how thoroughly broken the three of them were in that moment. 

Todd had just opened his mouth to say something (although he wasn’t exactly sure what it was he was going to say) before finally being interrupted by Dirk.

“I have something I need to tell you two.”


	24. Mistakes

“I don’t remember much from my life before Blackwing. I had a family, but no one I’d be able to find again. I dont– I don’t even remember what  _ planet  _ I was originally from.”

They were sitting around the table in the dining area of the ship now, after Farah had coaxed Dirk to get up off the floor and into a seat and Todd had wrapped a blanket around him. At this point they were wholly enthralled with Dirk’s story, both of them afraid to comment on anything he said, as if her were an injured animal that might run if they said the wrong thing or moved to abruptly.

“I do know the reason I was taken in, though. There was one day when everyone was looking for some lost pet, and I knew where it was and when it would be there. And then, a couple weeks later, I predicted that my friend’s dad would die two days before it happened. I’ve always thought that that was when they caught onto me.”

Todd still didn’t want to comment on anything Dirk was saying, so he decided not to say aloud that it made sense that Dirk had been such an unsettling kid.

He could see him now; big, wide, curious eyes in the middle of a pale face, always asking the kinds of questions that always made adults uncomfortable. He imagined that he and Dirk would’ve made fast friends back then, and stifled a smile at the thought.

“After that it was just tests and tests and test. They were always asking me to, like, lift things with my mind and stuff? Needless to say it barely ever worked. Even if I did used to be able to do that stuff, the ability is gone now.” He looked sad at the loss of abilities he wasn’t even sure he’d had in the first place. 

Dirk let there be a moment of silence, and Todd glanced at Farah to see that she was wearing a look of realization. 

Dirk seemed to notice this as well. “That’s why I shut you down when you started talking about the organization Patrick was in. Because...because it sounded an awful lot like Blackwing.”

Farah looked speechless, and Todd knew that they probably wouldn’t be getting anything out of her for a while.

“But when we met I asked you if you knew about the force and you said you knew nothing.” Todd said, not yet ruling out the idea that Dirk had just straight up lied to him. 

Dirk shrugged. “I’d heard about it in passing, sure, but I didn’t connect that to Blackwing. No one ever told me  _ anything  _ when I was there. They could’ve been testing for my ability to predict the weather for all I knew.”

Todd contemplated this. “But, that...that  _ whatever _ who just tried to kill you, do you think they’re connected to Blackwing?”

Dirk thought about this. Minutes earlier when he’d seen the look in that person’s eyes after saying his last words he had been as sure as ever that he and them had been in some way connected, but now he wasn’t so sure.

“I...I don’t know. Maybe?”

The three of them sat in silence, processing the events of the last thirty or so minutes. After a while Farah suddenly slammed her hands down on the table, eyes wide with realization.

“Where’s Lydia?”

~~~

Amanda couldn’t describe the feeling she felt when seeing the surface of Tiber again. It was akin to an ugly mix of nostalgia and resentment. Before the Rowdy 3 had taken her she hadn’t left the planet at all in around twelve years, but seeing it now she felt like it’d been a decade before she’d laid eyes on it’s dusty surface.

They landed near her settlement and, sure enough, there was Todd’s favorite ship, with the front door still sitting open. She was in the middle of running towards it when she felt a chill run up her spine.

Seconds later she was doubled over on the ground, white forms swimming in her vision. She felt the comforting presence of the rowdies gathered around her, but it didn’t help the feeling of helplessness she was overcome with.

She’d seen so many people do so many cool and heroic things in the past days, and yet here she was struggling to maintain consciousness. 

Except she wasn’t fainting, at least not yet. She felt a little give in the blackness that etched itself on the edge of her vision, and slowly she fought it back until she was conscious enough to lift her head. She saw the rowdies preparing to do their thing, but held out a pained hand to stop them.

Suddenly she noticed that the ghosts were doing something they’d never done before; they were swirling around and beginning to converge into one spot, a couple feet in front of her.

She stared as they began to form a solid shape, and then a solid humanoid figure.

The figure, once fully formed, stared down at the five of them and then down at itself in apparent wonder, before whispering two words to no one in particular.

“What the  _ fuck _ .”

~~~

“You  _ lost  _ it?”

Friedkin cast down his eyes like an ashamed animal in the middle of being scolded. 

“I– I left the door open…”

Riggins furiously rubbed the bridge of his nose. He knew that they didn’t really need the bb unit for anything, but the he felt that the fact that they’d gone so far out of their way just to get it just to eventually lose it– not to mention that the thing was now the only remaining evidence of their operation that was out in the world– was a testament to his boss’s incompetence.

“Okay. Okay, whatever. We’re already behind schedule anyway, so we certainly can’t go looking for it. Let’s just hope no one  _ important  _ finds it.” He gave Friedkin one more glare before plopping himself down in the copilot’s seat.

~~~

Lydia didn’t  _ love  _ the situation she was in, but she was certainly enjoying it more than what it had been twenty minutes earlier.

When she’d seen that the taller man had left the door of the cruiser open when leaving to have lunch she’d assumed it was simply too good to be true. But, now that she was zooming between the legs of people walking down the streets she wondered if she might finally be free. 

She was having a hard time keeping herself and her thoughts oriented, but she was pretty sure she was still on Leviathan. She recognized the familiar trash-and-sewage smell and knew that the ride hadn’t been long enough for them to have gone off-planet.

But now she had another, different problem to resolve. She didn’t know where to go from here, and was beginning to worry that her mind wouldn’t be able to persist at such a small capacity. Not for the first time, she wished desperately that Farah was there. 

It turned out that she wouldn’t really end up having to decide where to go or what to do, because before she had a chance to run she was– for the fourth time that week– scooped up off the ground and carried off against her will.


	25. Officers

Est-vz was willing to admit that he did, at times, have a bit of a short fuse. However, he was 100% positive that he’d never felt as angry before in his life as he did marching into his captain’s office. 

“You’re _dropping the_ _case_?”

The captain– a portly man of non-human origin– was sitting at his desk with his hands folded regally in front of him, clearly already having been expecting him. He didn’t react at all to Est-vz’s yelling, and the droid took that as permission to continue.

“This is an  _ important _ case! Our most important officer is  _ dead,  _ his lieutenant is still  _ missing  _ and... and Zim is  _ gone. _ ”

For a couple more moments the captain didn’t react, and when he did he remained infuriatingly calm and collected.

“You seem to have forgotten, officer, what the purpose of this operation is. We are a  _ fake  _ investigation agency. It is not our  _ job  _ to investigate, only to deal with matters pertaining to the resistance and nothing else.”

“But..but…” Est-vz hadn’t expected there to be this much pushback to his pleas. He thought he’d at least  _ listen _ . “But this  _ is  _ resistance business. And it’s important business at that. There’s something going  _ on  _ here.”

“Oh really.” The captain said, his calmness turning into smug superiority. “And how’s the investigation going, then? What  _ evidence  _ do you have, eh? A droid that  _ you _ let roll right out of the station? a witness that  _ you  _ let escape? At this point, we’re better off leaving it where it is.”

Est-vz had upgraded to full-on fuming by this point. “No, no no. this is wrong. We have to look into this, it’s… it’s  _ obviously  _ connected!” with this he violently kneed the underside of the captain’s table, causing it to shake and for his cup of coffee to fall over. 

The captain stared down at where the coffee was soaking into the papers on his desk, before returning to his usual self.

“Officer, if you continue to lash out in this way I will be forced to reassign you.”

Est-vz was nearly blinded by rage at this point, red flashing at the edges of his vision as he tried to block out the image of the ragged hole the crossbow had torn into his partner’s body.

“ _ Seriously _ ?” At this point Est-vz was sure that his voice could be heard all the way across Leviathan. “You know what _? _ ” he stood abruptly from the chair, pushing the table away from him in the process.

“That doesn’t matter. What you say doesn’t  _ fucking  _ matter, because I  _ quit. _ ”

Calmly, again; “Whatever you say, officer. Collect your things.”

~~~

On his way out of the station, Est-vz was riding a high of anger. He didn’t bother to collect his things like the captain had said; it wasn’t like he had anything important here anyway. 

He was so distracted by the theatrics of his outburst that he didn’t realize that someone was calling his name until he bumped directly into them.

He looked up to see that he was face to face with the helmet of one of their lower ranking officers.

“Officer Est-vz, right?”

Est-vz’s display lights blinked incredulously. “Y– yes?”

The officer nodded. “I uh, found this. I thought it was part of your investigation? The Spring case?” They pulled something from behind their back.

It was a small novelty bb-unit.

Est-vz stared down at it, the confusion of the past two hours suddenly culminating in one giant whirlwind at the center of his hard drive. He stared for a little longer.

“Uh...yes. That is mine, thank you.” He took the thing out of the Officer’s hands as gently as possible.

“Well, that’s good.” They laughed. “It’s funny, I saw it just rolling down the street when I was walking back from my lunch break. I recognized it from when you were carrying it around a while back!”

The officer smiled amiably and Est-vz did his best to act happy in return, attempting to mask how utterly afraid and befuzzled he was at the moment. 

“Oh, well...I’m glad you found it, then.”

~~~

He finally walked out into the street, cradling the droid in his arms as gently as he could manage. It was raining.

It was then, when he finally had the ability to calm down, that he realized what had just happened. Not only had he quit his job, but he’d quit the entire resistance. 

He’d quit on the resistance, and they would be looking for him. 

~~~

Whatever ZiM had imagined death to be like, this wasn’t it. It was much more akin to what he imagined being flushed down a toilet felt like (not that he’d ever used one, only seen them in action). 

The pain in his side had disappeared pretty quickly, and now the only thing he was feeling was befuddlement and a general airiness. 

That was how it was at first, at least. After awhile, he noticed the pull of gravity slowly returning. Soon he had a physical form again– which was a bit disappointing– and finally felt his feet touch ground. 

He was standing in front of five people in what appeared to be a long, endless desert. Not exactly his ideal image of the afterlife. He looked down and noticed that his old body was fully restored, the gash created by the crossbow having seemingly been totally healed. He also noticed that he was glowing a faint blue. 

He looked back up at the five people and whispered faintly; “what the  _ fuck _ ”

~~~

When all else failed, Est-vz decided to buy some booze.

It was a special beverage, made specifically for the consumption of droids. It was extremely high-tech and could get you as drunk as ever. 

The bb unit was balanced on the bench beside him. Every once in awhile it would say something, but he was barely listening and the thing seemed to realize quickly that he wasn’t in the mood to be beeped at. 

At first Est-vz had felt frantic– he was worried that the resistance would be waiting for him around every corner. It wasn’t that he thought they were tyrannical or bloodthirsty; only that he possessed a lot of extremely classified information that they probably wouldn’t want out in the world, especially when he and them had separated on such unfortunate terms.

But after awhile he calmed down, realizing that if they were planning on taking him out it probably wouldn’t happen immediately– especially when he had been such a respected member. They’d probably leave a grace period– give him a little time to get ahead before tracking him down.

So now he was left to stew in a special mix of memories and regret. His partner’s face flashed in front of him again and again. 

He turned, eventually, to look at the bb unit, which had stopped moving and was staring solemnly off at the buildings across the park.

“How you doin’, little buddy?” Est-vz drawled through his alcoholic haze.

The unit beeped in reply, but instead of its usual muddled gibberish it instead said the following, eerily methodically;

“My name’s not  _ buddy _ , and it’s not  _ bb-r _ . I’m  _ Lydia. _ ”

Est-vz stared down at the droid in disbelief. 


	26. Seance

After the first couple moments of confusion, the droid seemed to finally realize who they were. He raised a finger to point at them.

“Y-you… th- the gang, from the police station…” His subtle fear turned to anger in a split second. “”You  _ wrecked everything _ .”

“Who is this joker?” Vogel asked strenuously.

“The police guy.” Gripps explained. “From the cop place, with all the cops.”

Seemingly unable to contain himself any longer, Cross sprung forward like a jungle cat and attempted to topple the droid, but instead passed through one side of him and came out the other. The form of the droid shuddered like an unstable hologram, and it was then that Amanda noticed the faint blue glow that surrounded him.

She took two steps forward, and she squinted into his eye-approximations, the gears in her head working furiously.

“Are you...dead?” she asked, acting purely on hunch alone.

He looked down at his hands again, like his own body was a puzzle he had yet to decipher. “I… I think so. At least I  _ thought  _ so.” He then looked back up at her, his voice sounding more confident this time. “I mean, I seem to  _ remember  _ dying, but I’m clearly not dead, at least at the moment.” He squinted at the barren landscape around him. “Where  _ am  _ I, even?”

Amanda decided to ignore the second part. “But you  _ are  _ dead.” She let there be a second of dramatic silence, glancing around at the other rowdies before continuing. “You’re a  _ ghost _ .”

“Like… Like a force ghost?” Vogel asked, suddenly interested in the conversation again now that it was getting interesting. 

Amanda nodded. “Unless you know of any other type of ghost.”

Martin’s voice came from behind her, sounding a bit dismissive. “That’s an interesting theory, blue, but I think you gotta be a force user to be a force ghost.”

Amanda turned to look at the other rowdies and shook her head, not even bothering to question how Martin knew that. “See, that’s just a myth. But my parents, they were obsessed with the force, always studying it and stuff. The books they found on it were  _ ancient _ , with information that even actual Jedi probably didn’t know. They said that you didn’t have to be a force user, you just had to have been connected to the force in some way.”

She turned back to the increasingly confused droid. “Did you die at the hands of a force user? Or, uh, did someone use the force to kill you or something?”

He shook his head, but after a couple moments doubt crept into his expression– at least, Amanda thought it did. Honestly he was pretty hard to read.

~~~

Zim held in his mind’s eye the image of the crackling blue electricity that had riddled his insides the moments before his death. There had been something strange about it– cold, where it should’ve been warm, and strangely solid.

“I...maybe.” When he saw the dawning look on the girl’s face he realized how irrational he sounded and attempted to shake himself of these silly notions.

“But, that’s ridiculous. I was  _ shot,  _ by a  _ gun,  _ and whether or not that gun behaved slightly strangely is moot. Besides, the force isn’t  _ real. _ This whole conversation is utterly pointless.”

~~~   
Martin came and stood next to Amanda, putting a comforting hand on her shoulder. She stifled a smile as she realized that the others were finally warming up to her theory. 

“Well, aren’t you kind of proof that that’s not true?” Amanda said, and as if to punctuate this Vogel pounced on and through the droid, joining Cross on the ground behind him.

The droid looked slightly angry and, above all, utterly confused. “Stupid. This whole thing is ridiculous.”

Amanda’s brain was working furiously. This was a breakthrough, for sure, but what had been broken through? What did it mean, and what did it have to do with her? 

“So, what were you doing when you were shot? Like, who shot you and everything?”

~~~

Memories weren’t coming very easily to Zim. Every time he attempted to recall what had happened before his death the memory seemed to drift farther and farther away. He ground his gears.

“My partner and I… we were investigating… someone stole a vital piece of evidence from the murder of Patrick Spring. One of the suspects… we followed whoever it was to this hotel, and there were a bunch of guys with guns there. That’s who shot me.”

His thoughts came to a grinding halt as he made a sudden realization– he remembered something one of the men from the hotel had said before fatally shooting him. “That guy, the suspect… Toddson or something. It must’ve been him, the one who took the droid to the hotel!” He raised his hands in a show of ecstasy at having finally– at least partially– solved the case. 

The girl’s eyes grew wide. She glanced around at her companions, making it clear that they knew something that ZiM didn’t. “Todd? Todd Brotzman?”

ZiM nodded. His detective instincts were kicking in, and the fact that they were actually getting somewhere excited him. 

“Yeah, yeah! Why, do you know him?” 

~~~

Amanda couldn’t suppress the worry she felt towards her brother, despite her best efforts. He hadn’t been in the best condition when she’d left him– physically or emotionally– and this exchange hadn’t exactly done anything to quash her apprehension.

Amanda chose not to acknowledge the droid’s question. Politeness had gone out the window for her long ago. Instead she continued to grill him; “Do you...do you think he could be in trouble?”

The droid looked at the extensive desert that stretched outward in every direction. “I don’t know, young lady. We did follow him– or at least his path– to a building full of men with guns. Not to mention the dead body."

Amanda’s heart jumped into her throat, and it must’ve shown on her face because suddenly the droid was scrambling to take back his words. 

“Oh, don’t worry, I don’t think it was anyone you know. It was some un-humanoid life form, it probably wasn’t even related to your brother.” He didn’t seem so sure about that last part, though. And honestly, after what she’d learned about her brother in the last day she couldn’t entirely put it past him to kill a man.

~~~

Believe it or not, ZiM actually wanted to help this girl. He racked his brain for more details of the case, in an attempt to do what he sorely wished he could’ve done before dying– actually solve Patrick Spring’s murder. 

Something jumped out at him; it was hiding at the back of his mind, nearly forgotten, but as soon as he recalled it an image jumped into stark contrast. 

A memo, barely relevant, sent from Spring’s personal computer a couple days before his murder. 

He looked up at the girl, who had her eyes cast to the ground. She looked contemplative and strangely afraid. 

“Do you know anything about a worm?”

The girl squinted at him as if he had just spoken absolute gibberish. “What– ?”

ZiM waved her off. “Nothing, forget I said anything.” If he’d been organic he would’ve blushed. How stupid he’d been to assume that memo had actually meant something. 

Suddenly ZiM became aware of a nauseous feeling in the lower half of his body– which was new to him, being a robot– and when he looked down he saw that he was fading. Everything from his ankles down had completely disappeared. 

The girl seemed to have noticed this, too, and took a couple desperate steps toward him.

“Is there anything else? Anything important? This...this feels important, and I want to know everything I can.”

ZiM looked down at his increasingly transparent hands. “No, I’m sorry. I have nothing more to impart. I....” He looked up at the sky, which was a big orange-and-blue expanse at this time of day. “I’m glad to know there’s some kind of afterlife for us droids.”

Amanda smiled, but couldn’t help but feel her heart compress. 

In the next second, the droid was gone without a trace.

Vogel looked around bewilderedly for a moment, before finally speaking from where he was still seated on the ground. “What did he say about a worm?”

Amanda’s eyes swept across the faces of her companions, before finally landing on Martin. He looked half confused and half desperately trying to hide how confused he was.

“Let’s go get those crystals.” Amanda said resolutely. 


	27. Rough

“L-Lydia?” Est-vz sputtered. There were a lot of reasons as for why he might be confused at the moment, but somehow the only reason he could think of at the moment was that Lydia was a very, very strange name for a droid.

The bb unit nodded to the best of its ability.

Est-vz leaned on the idea that this might’ve been simply a fun trick the droid’s previous owner had taught it– maybe this was only a one-time thing. He decided to test his hypothesis.

“Is there anything… is there anything else you can tell me?”

The bb nodded again. “A...little.” It said, sounding significantly less coherent. “It’s...hard.”

“So who… named you Lydia?” Est-vz said, before quickly wondering if he could’ve possibly asked a dumber question.

“My dad.”

Est-vz felt a chill, which was unusual for him, as someone made entirely out of metal. “Your dad…Patrick Spring?” It all seemed to fall together. The missing daughter, the murder scene, the men at the hotel. 

At least, mostly it did.

The bb unit nodded again. 

Est-vz shoved his hands into his sensors and pushed frustratedly. There must be something thoroughly wrong with him if he was actually considering, even for a second, that this droid was Captain Spring’s daughter.

“So, can you tell me who took you from the station?”

The bb unit did its best to reply, although it seemed a bit annoyed at the fact that Est-vz clearly didn’t believe it.

It didn’t surprise Est-vz to find out that Brotzman and his companion had been the one to steal the droid. He’d been positive that that guy had some bigger connection to the case, and it felt good to know that he’d been right. Although he got the feeling this was the last time he’d feel good in long a while. 

~~~

Todd hated himself for the look he’d put on Farah’s face. He knew that it’d been only necessary to tell her that Lydia had been taken, but that notion didn’t really help the sour feeling sitting in the middle of his stomach.

She looked sickly and angry and broken. He realized that whatever suffering he’d gone through in the past couple days, she’d been through shit a thousand times worse. 

“I need to change my bandages.” She said finally, but Todd knew that she really just wanted to be alone. 

His and Dirk’s eyes followed her as she slipped into the bathroom, first aid in hand.

The two of them sat in silence for a minute, staring at their hands. But Todd was resolute to keep them from sitting around and moping– what right did they have to mope when Farah had it so much worse?

Todd hated the silence that filled the bridge. He felt restless and angry that the atmosphere didn’t reflect that. 

He got up, breaking the icy silence. He walked over to where his mandoviol lay propped against the wall and knelt beside it, taking it into his lap.

“I’ve never actually heard you play.” Commented Dirk from where he was still sitting at the table.

“We’ve known each other for two days.” Todd retorted, but the expression that Dirk had on his face made him immediately regret it. 

Todd ran his hands up and down the strings without playing anything. He pretended not to notice Dirk getting up and walking over to him until he was sitting directly next to him.

“I used to play with my sister. She says that playing music made her feel less sick, like it let her forget herself. I felt like it was the least I could do.”

“I mean, you paid for her medications all those years. You helped her. That’s not nothing.”

Todd shrugged, attempting to look at least half as sad as he actually felt. “Yeah, but as far as she’s concerned those pills were bought with blood money.” He started strumming the strings of the instrument halfheartedly. Even if his expression didn’t betray him, the music made it clear how melancholy he was actually feeling.

Dirk didn’t say anything for a couple moments, before getting up and standing over him.

“That’s bullshit.”

Todd stopped strumming “What?”

“Todd, you’re not perfect– like you’re  _ really  _ not– but nobody  _ is _ . You’re not going to get anywhere with this self deprecating bullshit.” 

Todd finally hazarded a glance up at Dirk’s face, and he was surprised to see fires burning in his eyes behind a film of tears.

“I’ve seen you do some pretty amazing things in the past days. You keep helping me even though you don’t have to, and, hell, you’ve even saved my life a couple times. At this point I consider you one of my only friends, so imagine how shitty it must feel to see you bitching like this all the time.”

In that moment Todd could believe without a doubt that Dirk had full grasp of the force, because for some reason he actually believed his words– he actually believed that he might be worth something.

This single electric moment was broken only when Farah walked out of the ship’s bathroom. She gave them a once-over before deciding not to ask what had been going on before she’d walked in. 

“So,” She said, barely suppressing the sadness in her voice “What now?”


	28. Expository

“Okay so, obviously Patrick Spring and Blackwing are related.”

Todd and Farah found themselves once again sitting at the table in the main space of the ship, Dirk pacing the floor in front of them. The awkwardness from a couple minutes ago was still lingering in the air but Todd had a feeling that Dirk would clear that up in the next couple minutes. Or make it worse, it was honestly always a gamble with him.

“Maybe he was the originator, or maybe he was just an employee, but either way we know he was connected in some way.” Dirk continued. Out of the corner of his eye Todd saw Farah cringe, but he could tell that she’d long since abandoned her former all-too-perfect view of her boss. 

“But what we  _ don’t  _ know is how that’s related to his murder, or his sect of the resistance or…” He ran his hands through his perfect hair, making it look the messiest Todd had seen it since they’d met. 

“Okay, okay, what if… If Patrick Spring used to work for the Empire, but last we saw him he was working for the resistance, then… The Empire probably didn’t  _ like  _ that. It would make sense that they’d want to kill him. But why do it  _ years _ after he’d left them?”

Todd was already feeling a little lost, but Farah seemed to be following Dirk’s meandering train of thought perfectly.

“It would explain why the resistance did so much work to keep all of Patrick’s operations under wraps. I used to think it was just because Patrick was such a great asset, as an operative and an inventor, but it would make sense for them to want to hide him if the Empire was still looking for him.”

Dirk nodded ecstatically, and Farah smiled meekly in response. 

“So, that explains why it took them so long to find him. But why kidnap Farah, and why would they...do what they did to Lydia?”

Todd leaned forward, now fully invested. “I mean it was obviously for information, right? They killed Patrick, but they probably still had stuff they wanted to know about him. And it’s probably easier to lug around a bb unit than a girl.” He speculated, choosing to glaze right over the whole girl-inside-the-body-of-a-droid thing for the sake of efficiency.

Farah seemed skeptical. “Yeah, but they didn’t seem to care much about Lydia after the fact. It’s likely that they did that to Lydia more to torture Patrick than anything else. She was the only thing he cared about more than his work, even if he didn’t always show it. Seeing whatever happened to her...happen, probably hurt.”

“That’s sick” Said Todd. “Like, really sick.” Farah nodded. 

“But this all doesn’t explain why they chose  _ now  _ to do it. Like,  _ now  _ now.” Dirk paused and rubbed his face. Todd sensed that his mind was going places that neither he nor Farah could follow.

It was a couple more moments before he started up again. “So here’s my proposition; the empire is planning something, something that is connected to Spring or his work.” He said, turning to Farah.

She thought for a moment “Patrick was obsessed with the force, but it wasn’t just force-users. He was obsessed with force as  _ energy _ , as something harnessable that he could use to his advantage.”

Todd glanced up at Dirk to see what he made with this information to find that his face had gone ghostly pale. The expression was gone as soon as it appeared and suddenly Dirk was back to his usual gibberish-spouting self. 

“So, so, so… let’s say Patrick did find a way to ‘harness’ the force like he wanted to.” Dirk paused and once again Todd could see his brain working furiously behind his eyes.

“I’ve got it. Spring figured out how to reach his goal of harnessing force energy, but for some reason he didn’t go through with it. Instead he abandoned his work with the Empire and moved over to the resistance so he could take care of his daughter and maybe have a chance at a safe life. But years later the Empire finally starts to put his inventions into action and decide they just can’t have him out there _ living  _ and anything, since he’s the only other one who knows about their plan. So they go out, and the kill him.”

“But once again, why would they wait so long?” Todd asked, barely following Dirk’s train of thought. 

Farah leaned forward, looking just as invested as he felt. “Actually, Patrick had a tendency of writing his blueprints in code. It’s possible they hadn’t cracked it until now.”

Dirk nodded, smiling widely.

Todd was totally ready to accept this theory of Dirk’s as truth when he remembered something that had been itching at him throughout this whole case.

“What about the worm?”

Dirk gave Todd the kind of whithered look he was probably more used to getting. “What?”

Todd shrugged. “I… I don’t know. I just know that the bots at the police station and the guys at the hotel both mentioned it, so it has to mean something.” He smiled sheepishly as Dirk looked like his whole carefully built case was falling apart around him.

“I...I dont…”

Todd waved him off as best he could. “Nevermind, I’m sure It’s nothing.” He said, but the damage was done. Dirk was a little less sure of himself.

Farah ignored this exchange and stood up resolutely. 

“Okay, but what are we going to do with this information?”

**Author's Note:**

> please leave any comments/ideas/theories. Hopefully The next chapter will be up in a week, but I need some reinforcement to make that happen!


End file.
